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Belarussian President Alexander Lukashenko skipped a key security summit Sunday, raising the stakes in an escalating trade conflict with Moscow. Lukashenko’s snub prompted a rebuke from President Dmitry Medvedev, who complained that the Belarussian leader had not even bothered to call himself to explain his absence. “I would like to say that leaders should act as partners in such a situation,” Medvedev told reporters. “Alexander Grigoryevich Lukashenko did not call me on the telephone and tell me that he had made the decision not to come, but staff from his administration called us,” he said. He also said Belarus’ actions “excessively politicized” a technical trade issue. |
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FLOWER POWER
Alexander Belenky / The St. Petersburg Times
Models pose on Senate Square, taking part in the International Flower Festival which was held on Russia Day on Friday. The festival was held on the Square and in the nearby Alexandrovsky Gardens. |
 St. Petersburg’s State Russian Museum on Friday launched a six-month “Open-Air Museum” event on the streets of St. Petersburg and Moscow. The art event will see the museum displaying copies of 100 highly-acclaimed Russian paintings on facades on boulevards and squares around the cities. Among the exhibits will be Ilya Repin’s celebrated “Barge Haulers on the Volga River,” “The Ninth Wave” by popular Russian marine painter Ivan Aivazovsky; “Night at the Crossroads” by Viktor Vasnetsov, and Mikhail Vrubel’s “Six-Winged Seraphim.
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The world-renowned Mariinsky Theater has launched a grand-scale outreach program with the aim of attracting local students and young people to its two performance venues. Valery Gergiev, the company’s indefatigable artistic director, has devised a program that sees local universities distributing tickets to the Mariinsky at special low prices. |
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New Mosque, Institute ST. PETERSBURG — A new mosque and Islamic institute are set to open their doors in St. Petersburg’s Primorsky district next month, Interfax reported. |
All photos from issue.
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The apartment of a political and human rights activist was searched by the police on farfetched grounds last week, the activist said at a press conference held on Thursday at the office of Soldiers’ Mothers, a group that defends the rights of Russian soldiers and their families. |
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MOSCOW — President Dmitry Medvedev has dismissed Russia’s long-serving ambassador to Ukraine, Viktor Chernomyrdin, months before the presidential elections in a country that handles most of the Russian gas transit to the European Union. |
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MOSCOW — Belgium has dismissed its ambassador to Russia after he helped billionaire Suleiman Kerimov get visas for Thai dancers to attend a party in France. Ambassador Bertrand de Crombrugghe breached procedural regulations when he lobbied personally at his embassy’s consular section for visas for five Thai women wishing to travel with Kerimov to France, Foreign Minister Karel De Gucht told the Belgian parliament, Agence-France Press reported. |
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MOSCOW — Prime Minister Vladimir Putin has tried his hand as an art critic, suggesting improvements to a painting that a respected Russian artist completed 36 years ago. |
 MOSCOW — President Dmitry Medvedev presented state awards to people who reached new frontiers in outer space and cyberspace as the country celebrated the Russia Day holiday with a long weekend. Medvedev handed out awards to 12 people during a ceremony Friday in the Kremlin’s Georgiyevsky Hall, including the first woman in space, Valentina Tereshkova, and Yevgeny Kaspersky, the founder of the eponymous anti-virus software. |
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Japanese automobile concern Suzuki Motor Corp. has postponed the construction of its automobile plant near St. Petersburg. “We have postponed the project,” Shoji Shigeru, general director of Suzuki Auto Rus, said last week, Interfax reported. Shigeru, however, did not comment on why the company had made such a decision and when it was planning to begin work again. St. Petersburg Governor Valentina Matviyenko confirmed that the project had been frozen, RIA Novosti reported. Matviyenko said however that it was too early to speak about the complete end of the project. “Suzuki wanted to and do want to build the plant. The crisis will end, and the investors will come back to the project,” Matviyenko said. |
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BOTTOMS UP!
/ Reuters
Ukrainian Prime Minister Yulia Tymoshenko and Belarussian counterpart Sergei Sidorsky make a toast in Kiev on Friday. They signed agreements on boosting bilateral trade and economic cooperation. |
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Trailing behind its emerging market peers in terms of capital inflows and facing a sharp economic contraction at a time when China and India are continuing to see growth, Russia is having a hard time making the case that fundamentals are driving its market rally and that it has the financial architecture to sustain these gains much longer. Brazil, Russia, India and China — collectively known as BRIC, an acronym coined by Goldman Sachs chief economist Jim O’Neill in 2001 — will hold their first summit Tuesday in Yekaterinburg and are heralding their purchase of International Monetary Fund bonds as a signal that the countries are financial forces to be reckoned with.
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The Primorye region on Sunday brokered the handover of miner Russian Tungsten to new owners following a year of protests over wage arrears at the company and a Kremlin warning that Far East political leaders should resolve the dispute. The company will cede control of production sites and allow an as-yet undetermined state firm to operate them for five years, according to an agreement signed by Governor Sergei Darkin, a representative of Russian Tungsten, and a representative of the workers. |
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Hotel Group Eyes City ST. PETERSBURG (SPT) — The international luxury hotel group Hotels&Preference said at a presentation held in the city at the end of last month that it would focus on St. |
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 On Tuesday, the leaders of Brazil, Russia, India and China will be meeting in Yekaterinburg for the first summit of the BRIC powers. It remains unclear what the BRIC leaders have in common, and what — if anything — they expect to achieve in Yekaterinburg. |
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Slim as an iPhone and just as adept at communication, U.S. President Barack Obama gave a speech in Cairo that has changed the game. His words were blunt but even-handed. |
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VENICE, Italy — The Venice Biennale, which marked its 53rd installment this year, is something of an artworld cross between the Grammys, the Cannes Film Festival and the Davos economic summit. Every other first week in June, the city is transformed from a tourist trap into the stage on which careers are made and the state of contemporary art worldwide is judged until the next time around. |
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LONDON — Andy Murray admits he will have to produce the form of his life to follow his Queen’s triumph with victory at Wimbledon. Murray clinched his fourth ATP Tour title this year on Sunday as he became the first Briton since Bunny Austin in 1938 to win the pre-Wimbledon warm-up event at Queen’s. |
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BIRMINGHAM, England — Maria Sharapova’s Wimbledon build-up suffered a setback on Saturday when she was knocked out of the Birmingham grasscourt event 6-4, 6-4 by China’s Li Na. |
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Issues Archive