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MOSCOW — Attempts to isolate and punish Russia for its military actions in Georgia will backfire, given Russia’s economic muscle and key role in mediating international disputes, senior Russian officials said Friday. Top officials in President George W. Bush’s administration have said Russia’s continued military presence in Georgia could jeopardize its membership in the Group of Eight and its bid to join the World Trade Organization, among other things. “We are a big economy today,” said Vladislav Reznik, chairman of the State Duma Financial Markets Committee. “Whether they like it or not, we have to be reckoned with. |
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BAYWATCH
/ Reuters
Georgians sit by the beach as the U.S.S. McFaul (rear) anchors at Georgia’s Black Sea port of Batumi on Sunday. The U.S. navy warship delivered humanitarian aid on Sunday for victims of Georgia’s brief war with Russia. |
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MOSCOW — Russia’s parliament unanimously approved on Monday resolutions calling for the recognition of two rebel regions of Georgia as independent states, a move likely to worsen already strained relations with the West. Both houses of parliament, which are controlled by Kremlin loyalists, swiftly approved non-binding resolutions calling on President Dmitry Medvedev to recognize the pro-Moscow breakaway regions of South Ossetia and Abkhazia.
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CHITA — A court in Chita on Friday turned down a parole request from Mikhail Khodorkovsky, the former boss of oil giant Yukos who is serving an eight-year sentence in the east Siberian city for fraud and tax evasion. The ex-tycoon’s lawyers said the decision by the Ingodinsky District Court was based on falsified evidence and provided “a shining example of the legal nihilism that President Dmitry Medvedev has himself criticized. |
All photos from issue.
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 Rock for Freedom, a free outdoor concert organized by opposition rock musicians to mark the anniversary of the 1991 failed coup and to address current issues such as Russia’s incursion onto Georgian territory, held in the city on Friday, almost ended in the arrest of its headliner Mikhail Borzykin of the band Televizor, when a City Hall official warned the organizers about the alleged use of expletives in his lyrics. |
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JERUSALEM — Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Olmert plans to visit President Dmitry Medvedev amid concern about reports that Moscow is considering arming Syria with advanced missiles, Israeli officials said Friday. |
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MOSCOW — Russia has hastened Georgia’s march toward membership in NATO by going to war over its breakaway province of South Ossetia, a senior U.S. diplomat said Saturday. “I think what Russia has done now is the strongest catalyst it could have created to get Georgia in NATO,” U. |
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WARSAW — U.S. Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice and Polish Foreign Minister Radoslaw Sikorski celebrated the signing of a missile-shield deal last week with Georgian wine, a choice sure to leave a bitter taste for Russia. |
 MOSCOW — When anesthesiologist Dmitry Sedykh was called to treat an 8-month-old suffering from heart failure this May, he found no equipment to resuscitate the baby boy. Sedykh, the only anesthesiologist in the village of Lesnoye in the Kirov region, was summoned to the children’s ward of the local hospital to help little Alexei Artemikhin, who was in critical condition because of severe pneumonia. |
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The Galaktika dairy plant, launched in Gatchina in the Leningrad Oblast on Friday, is capable of processing about 800 tons of milk and 100 tons of juice a day — making it one of the biggest enterprises of its kind in Russia’s northwest and one of the most modern in Europe. Finland’s Valio is a partner in the project, which some analysts expect to lead to a milk supply crisis in the region. The $82.5 million fully-automated successor of Gatchina’s dairy plant, which failed to meet production and sales targets, is named Galaktika (Galaxy), from the first syllable of the plant’s location, Gatchina, and the Greek word for milk, gala, reflecting the activity of the plant. |
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 Banned TNK-BP chief Robert Dudley has lodged an official complaint over the treatment of the company in a letter to five federal agencies. “There has been an abuse of power by the State Labor Inspectorate,” Dudley wrote in the letter dated Aug. |
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City Hall has announced it will choose a new contractor to build the new stadium for the city’s FC Zenit on Krestovsky Island, due to the increased cost of the project, and has also expressed hope that Russia’s state-owned energy behemoth Gazprom will finance 50 percent of the work. |
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Investors Take Flight MOSCOW (Bloomberg) — Investors withdrew money from Russia following the conflict in Georgia at the fastest rate since the ruble crisis of 1998, the Financial Times reported, citing figures from Russia’s central bank. |
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MOSCOW — A lawyer representing Hermitage Capital Management, once the largest foreign investor in the country, said his office was raided last week in what he said was an attempt to link him to tax fraud. Hermitage chief executive Bill Browder, an investor-rights crusader barred from Russia on national security grounds since 2005, has said three investment vehicles formerly under his control were used to defraud the state of $232 million in taxes. |
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MOSCOW — Severstal will pay $1.3 billion to acquire North American coal miner PBS Coals in an all-cash deal giving it access to raw materials for its expanding network of U. |
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MOSCOW — A steady stream of bad news sent the markets tumbling last week, and one of the few bright spots — when investors latched onto a report Friday that Mikhail Khodorkovsky had been granted parole — turned out to be false. The MICEX fell 5.9 percent to 1,374.69 points over the week, while the RTS slipped 4.7 percent to 1,702.61 points. The markets have fallen more than 30 percent from their May highs. The MICEX’s worst fall, of 5.2 percent, came last Tuesday, as oil and gas stocks took a battering from falling global oil prices and banking stocks were caught in the fallout from the crisis at Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac. Investors were worried about the continuing TNK-BP dispute, the Mechel pricing affair and the ongoing troubles faced by William Browder’s investment fund Hermitage Capital, whose lawyers last week had their offices raided by police. |
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 MOSCOW — With Russia quickly overtaking European countries to become the biggest car market and St. Petersburg earning the title of the Russian Detroit, a record number of carmakers have picked Moscow to unveil new models. |
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In any country — whether it is democratic or authoritarian — politicians in power do everything they can to make citizens pay more attention to foreign policy issues and less to domestic ones. The reason is simple: it is easier to manipulate people when the issue is abstract and remote. During the Soviet period, the Communist leadership liked to stress global issues, such as freedom for Africa or the Palestinians. The people were constantly told about the Soviet Union’s noble support of these movements on the news. This was done, in part, to try to mask the serious economic problems facing the country. The more Soviet citizens had to deal with serious economic problems, such as chronic shortages, on a daily basis, the less they cared about Africa or the Palestinians. |
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 One counterintuitive feature of the five-day war between Russia and Georgia is its minimal impact on the energy flows from the Caspian to world markets. |
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The city is luring Gazprom into the mammoth project of its new football stadium, after it emerged last week that the project’s costs have soared to three and a half times greater than the original estimates. City authorities expect that Gazprom, a majority shareholder of St. Petersburg’s football club Zenit will contribute “at least 50 percent of the financing,” St. |
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 What does the “Olympics War,” otherwise known as Russia’s invasion of Georgia, really mean? The war itself, of course, was predictable and predicted. Its results are equally clear. Prime Minister Vladimir Putin remains unambiguously in charge in Moscow. |
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Post-Soviet Russia is a curious place. It revels in unbridled jingoism that Soviet propaganda would have envied while renaming streets to honor dissident writer Alexander Solzhenitsyn. |
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BISHKEK, Kyrgyzstan — A passenger plane bound for Iran crashed shortly after take-off from the Kyrgyzstan capital of Bishkek on Sunday, claiming the lives of 68 people onboard, the health ministry said. The Boeing-737 with 90 people onboard went down a few kilometres from Bishkek’s Manas airport after the plane suffered a dramatic loss of cabin pressure, said Prime Minister Igor Chudinov. |
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HARARE — Police in Zimbabwe arrested two opposition Movement for Democratic Change (MDC) MPs in parliament on Monday and the party responded by saying it would stop the election of the parliamentary speaker. |
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 BEIJING — With its $40 billion landscape of twisted steel stadium, luminous Water Cube and imposing arenas arching high into the Beijing sky, the 2008 Olympic Games were as much a statement as a sporting spectacle. China’s lavish staging of the Games underlined the nation’s economic superpower status and served as a breath-taking statement of intent. |
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BEIJING — Flashing smiles as ultra-bright as the gold medals hanging around their necks, the United States restored basketball’s “natural order” at the Beijing Olympics. |
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BEIJING — Athletes at the Beijing Games lived up to the Olympic motto ‘Faster, Higher, Stronger’ and none more so than swimmer Michael Phelps and sprinter Usain Bolt. Jamaican Bolt, celebrating his 100 meters world record before he had even finished his gold medal-winning run, provided the most striking image but Phelps’s eight gold medals in the pool are likely to be regarded as the most enduring feat of the Games. |
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