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SEVERODVINSK, Arkhangelsk Region — A Gazprom-commissioned oil rig destined for the Arctic dwarfed the black hulks of diesel- and nuclear-powered submarines docked for maintenance Friday at the Sevmash shipyard, but its dimensions apparently left Prime Minister Vladimir Putin unimpressed. After being shown the towering structure, Putin walked with Cabinet members, industry executives, local officials and representatives of the shipyard to a nearby, freshly painted building to open a meeting on the future of the oil and gas industry. And he began with harsh words for Gazprom chief Alexei Miller. “I would like to draw the attention of ... Miller to the fact that oil and gas companies still experience certain problems with access to your pipelines,” Putin said, looking at the Gazprom chief executive. |
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GONE FISHIN’
Alexander Belenky / The St. Petersburg Times
A fisherman hauls in his vast catch next to Liteiny Bridge on the southern shore of the River Neva last week. Forecasters are predicting highs of 25 deg. Celsius during the week, with rain to follow on Thursday and Friday and temperatures to fall to 18 deg. Celsius. |
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MOSCOW — The Kremlin entered a new battlefield with the West over the weekend, with Washington and London accusing President Dmitry Medvedev of reneging on a promise with Russia’s decision to block United Nations sanctions against Zimbabwe. Moscow and Beijing both used their veto power Friday in the UN Security Council to derail an arms embargo and financial and travel restrictions on President Robert Mugabe, recently sworn in for a new term after conducting what his country’s opposition called a campaign of intimidation that killed dozens of people.
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A sports contest planned to take place next month near to where thousands of political prisoners met their deaths during the Soviet Union has angered human rights campaigners across the country. The multi-disciplinary athletics event, to take place in August on the Solovetsky Islands in the White Sea in Russia’s Far North, has been organized by the Ministry of Emergency Situations. |
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MOSCOW — Dozens of partygoers at an outdoor rave near Moscow last week have lost partial vision after a laser light show burned their retinas, Russian health officials said on Monday. |
All photos from issue.
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MOSCOW — Last week’s allegations of cloak-and-dagger activities between Moscow and London have raised fears of a deterioration in British-Russian ties that could spill over into business. Chris Bowers, director of the British Embassy’s Trade and Investment Section, a position just below that of counselor, was implicated in spying by a source in the Russian security forces on Thursday. He is London’s most senior diplomat dealing exclusively with trade ties, sources familiar with the matter said over the weekend. This would make Bowers Britain’s point man in the TNK-BP affair. |
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FISHING PARTY
Mikhail Klimentyev
RIA-Novosti/AP
Dmitry Medvedev with Communist Party leader Gennady Zyuganov, the Liberal Democratic Party’s Vladimir Zhirinovsky and A Just Russia’s Sergei Mironov in Moscow on Saturday. |
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MOSCOW — Georgia will shoot down any Russian fighter jets that violate its airspace, two senior Georgian officials said Friday, a day after Russia’s admission that it had flown sorties over the breakaway republic of South Ossetia. Georgian Reintegration Minister Temur Iakobashvili said his country had the right to shoot down flights that violated its territorial integrity.
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MOSCOW — A decade-old embezzlement case involving Federation Council Senator Andrei Vavilov has been closed for good because the statute of limitations has expired, an Investigative Committee spokeswoman said Friday. Vavilov, a Penza senator whose name has surfaced in numerous high-profile graft cases over the past decade, had been investigated on suspicion of embezzling $231 million in 1997. |
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The rise in people taking out mortgages in Russia has come crashing down from a 167-percent leap in 2007 to 19 percent in the first quarter of 2008. The number of banks and agencies offering mortgage services has also dropped, and experts predict growth will reach no more than 50 percent by the end of the year. “The Russian mortgage market is experiencing hard times,” says Vladimir Lopatin, president of the National League of Certified Mortgage Brokers. During the last twelve months, the number of credit institutions entitled to issue mortgage loans has declined from 700 to 500 due to problems with funding. |
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Horse Power / Reuters
A man standing by a horse pretending to pull a bus during a protest in the Siberian city of Krasnoyarsk last week. Car owners and drivers gathered to decry increasing gasoline prices. |
 Police intervened in an ownership conflict in St. Petersburg on Monday when a group of security guards attempted to take over a building occupied by Avtobaltservice, an affiliate of Arne Larsson and Partners, one of the first Russian-Swedish joint ventures in the city. At 9 a.m., a group of uniformed men from the Klyon security firm arrived at the building at 5 Nakhimova Ulitsa on Vasilyevsky Island, and blocked Avtobaltservice’s entrances, saying they had been authorized to take control of the building by its new owners, who had purchased it for $11 million at an auction in March, less than six months after Avtobaltservice failed to privatize the building at another auction.
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MOSCOW — The Finance Ministry has moved to stave off worries that the troubles at U.S. mortgage giants Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac pose a threat to the country’s gold and foreign currency reserves or the more than $157 billion it has salted away from taxes on energy exports. |
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CEOs As Diplomats ST. PETERSBURG (Bloom-berg) — Russia’s upper house of parliament on Friday approved a legislative proposal to issue diplomatic passports to heads of state corporations, Interfax reported. |
 LONDON — Sukhoi will announce 30 orders for its Superjet-100 regional aircraft at the Farnborough air show, a spokeswoman said Saturday. But with industry losses of $2.3 billion forecast worldwide this year and 25 airlines ceasing operations in the past six months, many carriers who usually use the event to trumpet new plane orders are expected to keep their wallets firmly shut. |
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MOSCOW — Russian billionaire shareholders are unhappy with the management of TNK-BP, their joint venture oil company with BP Plc, as the two sides battle for control. |
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United Airlines, the world’s second-largest carrier, has won U.S. permission to delay the start of its flights between Washington and Moscow by five months because of high fuel costs. The airline may start the service no later than March 29, the U.S. |
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MOSCOW — First Deputy Prime Minister Igor Shuvalov on Friday presented President Dmitry Medvedev with a list of independent directors to replace state officials on the boards of 11 fully state-owned companies, following through on a campaign pledge made by Medvedev earlier this year. |
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TEHRAN — Iran and Gazprom Sunday signed an agreement for the Russian energy giant to help Tehran develop its oil and gas fields. “The Iranian National Oil Company and Gazprom signed an agreement in which the two sides will cooperate in the development of Iran's oil and gas fields,” the oil ministry's Shana news agency said. |
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MOSCOW — Global financial turmoil will help Sberbank join the ranks of the world’s top 10 banks by market capitalization in the next five years, CEO German Gref said in an interview. |
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MOSCOW — Billionaire Alisher Usmanov’s Metalloinvest on Friday joined the race for the Udokan copper field, the country’s largest untapped source of the metal, just a few hours ahead of a bids deadline. The stakes in the fight for Udokan in eastern Siberia, estimated to hold 20 million tons of copper reserves, are high as the country’s richest oligarchs vie to win the rights to the lucrative field in a Sept. |
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 Recently we have witnessed a flurry of high-profile and contradictory statements on Russia. In a role reversal, the country’s leaders have been abnormally candid while several prominent Western politicians and pundits have lavished undeserved praise. In an interview with a group of foreign journalists on July 1 and in response to a question about Senator John McCain’s call to exclude Russia from the Group of Eight because of Moscow’s questionable record on democracy, President Dmitry Medvedev said the issue of democracy is irrelevant to the G8. |
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Victory Day is the only true national holiday in Russia. The pride in the country’s role in defeating Adolf Hitler is shared by Russians across social, economic and generational boundaries. |
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MARIEHAMN, Finland — In spring and fall, when temperatures are erratic, Fredrik Slotte sprinkles his vineyard with water. The water freezes, encasing the vines in thin tubes of ice that protect them from temperatures far lower than freezing. Is this Burgundy? The Napa Valley? No, it is the Aland Islands, a cluster of wooded islands in the Baltic Sea between Finland and Sweden, roughly 1,000 miles northeast of Burgundy. |
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NICE, France — Hollywood actress Angelina Jolie has given birth to twins, a boy and a girl, her doctor at a hospital in southern France said on Sunday. Oscar winner Jolie, 33, had the twins by caesarean section on Saturday evening at the Lenval hospital on the glamorous Promenade des Anglais waterfront drive in Nice. Actor Brad Pitt, the twins’ father, was at her side. The girl, named Vivienne Marcheline, weighed 2.27 kilograms while her brother, Knox Leon, weighed 2.28 kg. Marcheline was the first name of Jolie’s mother, also an actress, who died of cancer last year. “The parents and the babies are in excellent health. Everything is fine,” Jolie’s doctor, Michel Sussmann, told Reuters. He said the c-section had been planned for a long time but the date was brought forward “for medical reasons. |
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G’Day Holy Father / Reuters
Pope Benedict XVI arrived in Australia on Sunday for a nine-day visit. His image lit up Sydney Harbor Bridge to celebrate the event. |
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THE HAGUE — The International Criminal Court’s (ICC) prosecutor on Monday charged Sudan’s president with genocide and crimes against humanity in Darfur in a move Khartoum warns could set fire to the region. ICC Prosecutor Luis Moreno-Ocampo asked the court for an arrest warrant for President Omar Hassan al-Bashir, the first sitting head of state to be indicted by an international court since Liberia’s Charles Taylor and before that Yugoslavia’s Slobodan Milosevic.
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 ROME — Russia’s world and Olympic pole vault champion Yelena Isinbayeva set a world record of 5.03 meters at Rome’s Golden Gala. The 26-year-old cleared the bar with ease to surpass the record of 5.01 she set at the 2005 Helsinki world championships. Her nearest rival on Friday was Poland’s Monica Pyrek, who vaulted 4. |
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Issues Archive