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St. Petersburg will restore the hospital in the South Ossetian capital of Tshinvali and will be taking it under its patronage for the foreseeable future. The City Administration and local businesses are planning to finish the restoration of the hospital by the end of this year, Interfax reported. St. Petersburg Vice-Governor Alexander Vakhmistrov said on Tuesday that a delegation from the city had inspected the hospital. “We walked around it, examined it, and took pictures because there is no construction documentation. We established the volume of work and concluded an agreement with a contractor,” Vakhmistrov said. Vakhmistrov said that the minimum of works needed to allow the hospital to function will be completed by the end of the year. |
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WALK THIS WAY
Dylan Martinez / Reuters
Olga Kaniskina of Russia races toward the finish line to win the women’s 20 kilometer walk of the athletics competition in the National Stadium at the Beijing 2008 Olympic Games on Thursday. For further Olympic reports see page 12. |
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MOSCOW — Syrian President Bashar al-Assad may have been hoping to capitalize on Moscow’s current diplomatic isolation to expand military cooperation with Russia as he met with President Dmitry Medvedev in Sochi on Thursday. But even though a defiant Kremlin might be taking some perverse pleasure in welcoming the leader of what the United States has branded a “rogue state” at a time when some voices in the West suggest that Russia is on its own way to pariah status, analysts said it was unlikely that any significant arms deals would be signed.
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All photos from issue.
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CHITA, Russia — Jailed Russian tycoon Mikhail Khodorkovsky told a Siberian court at the start of his parole hearing Thursday that he does not plan to return to the oil industry, where he made his fortune. Khodorkovsky — who headed the Yukos oil company and was once Russia’s richest man — has spent almost five years in jail. He was sentenced in 2005 to an eight-year term for tax evasion and fraud and has been eligible for parole for the past 10 months. Even if granted parole, Khodorkovsky faces new charges and will be detained at least until Nov. 2. “After my release, I do not intend to return to the oil industry,” Khodorkovsky told a packed courtroom in the Siberian city of Chita, some 3,750 miles east of Moscow. |
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WOMAN IN WHITE
Alexander Belenky / The St. Petersburg Times
A woman walks along the embankment opposite the Hermitage against the backdrop of a rainbow partially obscured by clouds. Rain is predicted for much of the rest of the week. |
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MOSCOW — A senior Russian army officer has been arrested in the Stavropol region on suspicion of spying for Georgia, authorities said Wednesday. Mikhail Khachidze, an ethnic Georgian, was recruited by Georgian intelligence late last year while he was stationed in a unit based on Georgian territory, according to a statement issued by the Federal Security Service, or FSB.
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MOSCOW — Georgian broadcasters have stopped carrying transmissions by the last Russian-language television news channel operating in the republic after it aired comments by Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov criticizing the Georgian government. RTVi, an international satellite network that features regular reports critical of the Kremlin, had stopped broadcasting in Georgia as of Tuesday afternoon after airing the interview with Lavrov on the situation in Georgia’s breakaway region of South Ossetia, said Yevgeny Kiselyov, a prominent journalist and one of RTVi’s directors in Moscow. |
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 Environmentalists have raised concern over the ecological and economic sustainability of the St. Petersburg Western High-Speed Diameter, Russia’s first toll road which is due to be completed by 2012. The ZSD Nevsky Meridian consortium was awarded the tender for the construction of the controversial motorway flyover project, which consists of a series of tunnels and bridges, at this year’s St. |
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Colliers International has signed a contract with the Israeli development company Europort to find three land plots in St. Petersburg to accommodate A-class business parks covering 12 to 25 hectares and preferably located to the north, east and south of the ring road. |
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MOSCOW — Mechel, the miner savaged by Prime Minister Vladimir Putin last month, will escape with an enforced 15 percent reduction on coal prices for the steel sector from Sept. 1, less than had previously been feared. Mechel will also be fined 5 percent of last year’s coking coal revenues, or about 790 million rubles ($32. |
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MOSCOW — Russia is not planning to raise its exposure to debt issued by troubled U.S. agencies Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, but will not cut it rapidly, Deputy Finance Minister Dmitry Pankin said Wednesday. |
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SOCHI — President Dmitry Medvedev said Wednesday that he would meet with Russia’s top business lobby in September, while billionaire Vladimir Potanin said the meeting would discuss potential changes to the country’s tax system. Medvedev met with Potanin, a top shareholder of mining giant Norilsk Nickel who is ranked the country’s sixth-richest man, in his Black Sea residence near the town of Sochi to tell him that the time had come for the authorities to meet with big business. |
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 What is there about modern-day Russia and the month of August? Each year it is rare that the month passes without Moscow finding itself caught up in some history-making event. This year it is the war with Georgia. Ten years ago, on Aug. 17, 1998, Russia went through a severe economic crisis. |
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Fortunately, the Russia-Georgia war was short-lived, but its repercussions will be felt for quite a long time. By defeating Georgia and showing that Washington was unable to defend its own ally, Russia humiliated the United States in front of the whole world. |
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 Russian rock musicians will raise their voices in support of democracy and against war at Rock for Freedom, an outdoor concert held Friday. The concert was arranged to mark the failure of a three-day coup d’etat in the Soviet Union in August 1991 when thousands of Russians rose up to stop Communist Party hardliners, who had sent tanks into Moscow and declared a “state of emergency” in St. |
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Bèçà (visa) is an odd thing. It’s just a piece of paper, or a stamp, or a scribbled notation. But without it, a person can’t get from one place to another. |
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GENEVA — Pop star Valeria says she is drawing on her experience as a battered wife and “slave” to help migrant workers break free of sexual exploitation and forced labor in her homeland. Valeria last week was formally named as goodwill envoy for the Russian Federation on behalf of the International Organization for Migration, an agency she has teamed up with for the past year to combat human trafficking. “I meet and talk to these people,” the blonde 40-year-old told a news briefing. “I am not a professional psychologist, but I am sure I can help people with my own experience as an ex-victim of slavery. I suffered a lot of domestic violence.” “I was forced to work for a man, my [former] husband, who treated me like a slave. |
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 The Baltic Sea Festival — an annual classical music event with an environmental bent that runs under the joint leadership of Mariinsky Theater artistic director Valery Gergiev, Finnish-born conductor Esa-Pekka Salonen and Michael Tyden, managing director of Stockholm’s Berwaldhallen concert hall — began in Stockholm on Thursday. |
 The Moving Baltic Sea Festival, a traveling film and environmental event, is coming to St. Petersburg today for three days with its program of film screenings, bands and DJs, environmental activities, creative-workshops, and many other, large and small events, to be hosted mostly at the Sergei Kuryokhin Modern Art Center on Vasilievsky Island. The festival travels by sea on the boat Lovis, which has stopped in Germany, Poland, Kaliningrad, Latvia and Estonia, and is now anchored at Angliiskaya Embankment. |
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 Rumors about Hollywood adaptations of Russian classics or events from Russian history crop up regularly but often turn out to be hoaxes. One of the funniest was the one about a blockbuster based upon the events of the 1917 Revolution, with Bruce Willis in the part of Vladimir Lenin — apparently, because they are both bald. |
 The cover of the new English edition of Maria Galina’s “Iramifications” does little justice to the novel’s vibrant imagery and to the richness of its plot. In the Russian original, the cover features two men in modern suits floating through a starry Middle Eastern sky over a bas-relief of an Assyrian king. That scene, and the novel’s original subtitle, “A Mystico-Ironic Phantasmagoria,” hints far more successfully at the sweeping flights of Galina’s imagination. |
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 Rock and techno fans have flocked to this frontier village for a politically-charged music festival this weekend that’s acquired an edge due to the conflict in Georgia. |
 A new festival this Saturday in the very heart of St. Petersburg is called “De La’ Ruk,” which means handmade. The event aims to put together professionals and amateurs, who wish to show their works in different areas of design and applied art, lovers of unique things, representatives of design schools and shops that sell handmade goods. |
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El Barrio // 7 Inzhenernaya Ulitsa // Tel: 314-5926 // www.elbarrio.ru // Open daily from 12 a.m. until the last customer leaves // Menu in Russian only // Dinner for two with cocktails 1,540 rubles ($ 63) Despite having a prime location at the intersection of Sadovaya and Inzhenernaya Streets close to Gostiny Dvor metro station, temporarily camouflaged from the front by green netting because of never-ending reconstruction work, El Barrio, which literally means «a Spanish-speaking quarter or neighborhood in a city or town» seems to be one of those gourmet locations that is overlooked in downtown St. |
 This week, naturally enough, the tabloids concentrated on the conflict in South Ossetia. And Tvoi Den stood out with its punchy headlines, scatological humor and extreme patriotic fervor. On Saturday, it printed grim-faced portraits of Medvedev and Putin with a simple headline, “Men!” which probably works better in Russian. |
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 MADRID — Grieving relatives and medical staff on Thursday tried to identify the badly-burned bodies of victims of the crash of a Spanish jet in which 153 people were killed as it took off on a holiday flight from Madrid airport. The investigation into the crash, Spain’s worst aviation disaster since 1983, also got underway on Thursday with officials seeking to find out why the Spanair MD-82 jet aborted an initial take-off attempt shortly before the accident. |
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BANGKOK — Thai immigration authorities threatened Thursday to expel former glam rocker and convicted paedophile Gary Glitter to Britain after Hong Kong refused to let him in. |
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Issues Archive