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MOSCOW — Deputy Prime Minister Igor Sechin sought to assure OPEC on Sunday that Russia was doing its part in reducing global crude supply and proposed an overhaul of the market to rid it of financial speculators. OPEC said on Sunday that it would keep existing output levels unchanged but would seek to eliminate overproduction by some members. The decision comes after global crude prices stabilized from their free fall to just above $40 a barrel in the wake of the cartel’s steep production curbs that started in January. It means that the 12-member group, which accounts for 40 percent of the global oil supply, will work to cut another 800,000 barrels a day to meet its daily target of about 25 million barrels. |
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 MOSCOW — President Dmitry Medvedev urged regional lawmakers to debate the government’s anti-crisis policies and said he would welcome criticism. In a notable departure from Vladimir Putin’s Kremlin, which rarely tolerated criticism, Medvedev said open discussion of anti-crisis measures among the lawmakers was “permissible and even necessary,” as was criticism of the state’s efforts to rescue the economy. |
 Moscow police detained about 659 fans at a match between Russia’s eternal soccer rivals Spartak (Moscow) and Zenit (St. Petersburg) in Moscow on Sunday night. Zenit’s fans were the initiators of the disorder, and accounted for most of the detained — 513 people were Zenit fans, Interfax reported. During the game a Zenit fan threw a chair that he had torn from its mounting at the Spartak fans’ sector. |
All photos from issue.
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The mother superior of St. Petersburg’s Novodevichy Convent has said that the convent is ready to dispute the results of a cultural and historical commission which has opened the way for the construction of a multi-story building next to the convent. The Novodevichy Convent, which stands just off Moskovsky Prospekt, close to the Moskovsky Voroty metro station in the south of the city, was designed by the architect Nikolai Yefimov and built in the mid-19th century in the Greek and Byzantine style. In 1925 the monastery was closed, before being partially reopened in 1990. “We won’t stop our fight for what is right, even though the Russian State Construction Watchdog has given the construction company LEK permission to build the Imperial complex,” Mother Sofia said at a press conference on Thursday, Interfax reported. |
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THE HEALING ARTS
Alexander Belenky / The St. Petersburg Times
A painting by Alexei Bulgakov, a patient at the St. Nicholas the Miracle-Worker Psychiatric Hospital. An exhibition by the patients is on display at the Blok Museum until April 12. |
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Raid Under Review ST. PETERSBURG (SPT) — The Dzerzhinsky District Court will begin a review on Tuesday of human rights organization Memorial’s complaint over a December raid on its office, the organization’s lawyer said on Monday. The court will hear witness testimony and view videos of the raid on the St. Petersburg office of Memorial, according to the human rights group’s lawyer Ivan Pavlov, Interfax reported.
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MAGAS, Ingushetia — Ingush President Yunus-Bek Yevkurov, chosen to rein in Russia’s most violent insurgency, says he will tackle the root of the problem by stamping out the official corruption driving young men into the arms of Islamist rebels. “The root of the evil is in the dishonesty of local officials, and then the people start living in violation of the law because . |
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MOSCOW — A former senior Investigative Committee official went on trial Monday in a case that refocuses the spotlight on infighting between powerful clans that has rocked Russian politics for the past two years. |
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TBILISI, Georgia — President Mikheil Saakashvili said he would not prevent Russian companies, including power trader Inter RAO and gas producer Itera, from investing in Georgia, rejecting criticism that their control of utilities was a threat to security. “We’re not going to hinder Russian companies from coming to Georgia,” Saakashvili said in an interview in the Black Sea port of Batumi. “The more business interest we get, the less political pressure there will be. I’ve never said that Georgia doesn’t need Russian business.” A proposed agreement with Inter RAO, a utility controlled by Russian state nuclear corporation Rosatom, would give it “management control” of the 1,300 megawatt Inguri hydropower plant on the border with Abkhazia for 10 years. |
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 The trade stands of St. Petersburg and other Russian regions attracted a poor showing at the 43rd ITB Berlin, the leading trade fair for the global travel industry, which was held from Wednesday to Sunday at the Berlin Exhibition Fair Ground. |
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A unit of Oleg Deripaska’s Basic Element holding said Friday that it would probably close a pulp plant on UNESCO World Heritage Site Lake Baikal after measures taken to reduce pollution helped make the site unprofitable. Shutting down Baikalsk Paper and Pulp Mills would eliminate 2,000 jobs, and a final decision will be taken by shareholders in the “nearest future,” Deripaska’s Continental Management said on its web site. |
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AvtoVAZ Seeks $750M MOSCOW (Bloomberg) — AvtoVAZ, Russia’s biggest carmaker, indebted to suppliers, is seeking 26 billion rubles ($750 million) from the government to continue production, Vedomosti reported. |
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All federal highways in Russia will become toll roads as the state teams up with the private sector to build up and repair the country’s ailing transportation infrastructure, Deputy Prime Minister Sergei Ivanov said Friday at a meeting with the Transportation Ministry. Also at the meeting, Transportation Minister Igor Levitin said he had offered the post of deputy minister to Aeroflot head Valery Okulov, who has not yet responded to the offer. Affixing a toll to all federal highways would be consistent with international practice, Ivanov said, Prime-Tass news agency reported. “The whole world’s experience suggests that this is the most effective path,” he said, adding that the construction of toll roads should be undertaken by public-private partnerships “Projects of national importance, including those carried out as public-private partnerships, must be the priority,” he said. |
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 HORSHAM, England — Finance Minister Alexei Kudrin said Saturday that a global round of currency devaluations was creating problems and that the International Monetary Fund remained a critical source of help for emerging economies to stabilize exchange rates. |
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BRUSSELS — Russia is making “limited but forward progress” in its bid to become a member of the World Trade Organization, the official steering the negotiations at the global trade watchdog said Friday. Iceland’s envoy to the European Union, Stefan Johannesson, said he had called a meeting of the working group on Russia’s WTO membership, which he chairs, for March 27 and hoped that it might pave the way to further substantive talks. |
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MOSCOW — A lawyer for Farimex Products said Friday that it did not want Telenor to sell its stake in VimpelCom, a perhaps surprising admission given that Farimex has spent the past few months fighting in court to make Telenor pay close to the very value of that stake. |
 MOSCOW — It was the very peak of last October’s liquidity crisis, and Binbank owner Mikhail Shishkhanov knew that he had to act fast. To make the crucial, split-second decisions needed to assure the midsize bank’s survival, Shishkhanov — who had not been taking an active role in the company’s day-to-day operations — replaced his top executive with the person he felt was best able to handle the crisis: himself. |
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 MOSCOW — The majority of Russia’s billionaires couldn’t cope with the financial crisis, which wiped 55 names from the country’s tally in the 2009 Forbes rich list. |
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MOSCOW — Alfa Bank, Russia’s biggest private lender, is seeking to recover about $1 billion of debt from companies controlled by Oleg Deripaska after rejecting a payment moratorium agreed to by other banks. The Island of Jersey’s Royal Court last month froze ?13.7 million ($19 million) of assets belonging to EN+, through which Deripaska controls aluminum producer United Company RusAl, according to EN+ and Alfa Bank. |
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 Which event in Soviet history marked the beginning of the end for communism? It happened 27 years ago, when Mikhail Suslov, the chief Communist Party ideologist during the 1970s, died in January 1982. Those who subsequently filled his post — one after another in rapid succession — increasingly contributed their part to communism’s demise. |
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I sympathize with Russian leaders. Only a year ago, Russia had risen from its knees and assumed its rightful place at the head of the international table. |
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 SEMYONOV, Nizhny Novgorod Region — The state will place about 1 billion rubles ($28.4 million) in orders for crafts such as nesting dolls and hand-painted dishes and could reduce taxes to support craft makers whose sales have plummeted, the Industry and Trade Ministry said last week Thursday. Ministries, state agencies, the White House and the Kremlin will all make large purchases of matryoshki and khokhloma dishes to be used mainly for gifts, a spokeswoman for the ministry said. |
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 ST. POELTEN, Austria — An Austrian man who fathered seven children with a daughter he held in a cellar for 24 years pleaded guilty to incest on Monday but denied murdering a newborn son who died underground. The case of Josef Fritzl, 73, has sent a wave of revulsion through Austria and around the world. |
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ISLAMABAD — The restoration of top judges two years after their dismissal will give Pakistan desperately needed rule of law and marks up a victory for opposition leader Nawaz Sharif, analysts said. |
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JERUSALEM — Palestinian militants shot dead two Israeli policemen in an attack in the occupied West Bank on Sunday, the first incident of its kind in the area for several months. In Gaza, a spokesman for the al-Aqsa Martyrs Brigades, an offshoot of Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas’s Fatah faction, said a little-known group called the Imad Mougniyeh units had claimed responsibility for the attack. |
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 INDIAN WELLS, California — World number one Rafael Nadal breezed past qualifier Michael Berrer and into the third round of the Indian Wells Masters series on Sunday. Nadal downed Germany’s Berrer 6-2, 6-1 in just 67 minutes, encountering little resistance from the 28-year-old ranked 112th in the world. |
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LONDON — Guus Hiddink insisted the Premier League title race is far from over after Chelsea narrowed the gap on leaders Manchester United to just four points. |
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Issues Archive