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MOSCOW — The country’s top missile designer resigned Wednesday after the failed test-launch of a naval ballistic missile last week weakened Moscow’s negotiating position with Washington over a new arms treaty. “Yury Solomonov has submitted a letter asking that he be relieved from his duties as the general director and chief designer of the Moscow Institute of Thermal Technology,” said Alexander Vorobyov, a spokesman for the Federal Space Agency, which oversees the top-secret institute. Vorobyov said the resignation had been accepted. Solomonov’s Bulava intercontinental missile has failed in seven out of 11 test launches since 2004, the latest on July 15 when the missile self-destructed 20 seconds after launch from the submerged Dmitry Donskoi submarine in the White Sea. |
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STREET SCENE
Alexander Belenky / The St. Petersburg Times
A breakdancer performs at the opening ceremony of a new hostel, the Graffiti, which is located in a newly renovated building on the Moika River. Weather forecasters are predicting temperatures of about 22 deg. Celsius with rain over the weekend. |
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LONDON — Anthony Blunt, one of Britain’s most notorious Cold War spies, admitted that spying for Russia was “the biggest mistake of my life,” in memoirs released on Thursday, 26 years after his death. Blunt became known as the “Fourth Man” of a spy ring recruited among academics at Cambridge University, and went on to work for MI5 and leak hundreds of secrets to Moscow.
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The government will slash another 5 percent from construction and infrastructure costs for the 2014 Winter Olympics in Sochi, Deputy Prime Minister Dmitry Kozak said Wednesday, Reuters reported. “While previous assessments provided for 206 billion rubles ($6. |
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KIEV — Ukrainian authorities have arrested a former intelligence official in the slaying of an investigative journalist who was kidnapped and decapitated nine years ago, officials said Wednesday. |
All photos from issue.
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BRUSSELS — Russia has offered to coordinate the movements of its vessels hunting Somali pirates in the Gulf of Aden with NATO, diplomatic sources said Wednesday. The offer was made at a meeting of ambassadors at a NATO-Russia council meeting, representatives of the two sides said. NATO spokesman James Appathurai said the alliance was considering the Russian offer. Russia’s ambassador to the North Atlantic Treaty Organisation, Dmitry Rogozin, said that his country would not place its ships under NATO command but declared “we need coordination”. He highlighted that Russia was already working with a European Union military mission with ships and planes patrolling the Gulf of Aden and Indian Ocean to ward off pirate attacks. |
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SUB MISSION
Alexander Belenky / The St. Petersburg Times
A submarine moored on the River Neva, opposite the Bronze Horseman, in preparation for the celebrations of Navy Day, which is traditionally celebrated on the last Sunday of July each year. |
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MOSCOW — Russia and China on Wednesday launched massive joint military drills aimed at fighting terrorism and ethnic separatism, Russian news agencies reported. The five-day exercises near the two nations’ common border “must show the international community that Russia and China have the necessary resources to ensure stability and security in the region,” Ria Novosti quoted the chief of Russia’s general staff, General Nikolai Makarov, as saying.
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A group of Nobel peace laureates called on Russia on Wednesday to find the killers of activist Natalya Estemirova, saying there was “nothing more dangerous than telling the truth in today’s Russia,” Reuters reported on Wednesday. Estemirova, who worked for rights group Memorial in Grozny, was abducted on July 15 as she left her home and was found dead later that day in Ingushetia. |
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MOSCOW — A senior Chinese delegation arrived in Moscow on Wednesday as mounting tensions over the closure of Cherkizovsky Market threatened to sour relations between the two countries. About 60,000 Chinese traders worked at Cherkizovsky, Eastern Europe’s largest market, and the closure amid a smuggling crackdown could stymie Chinese investment in Russia, Chinese state media reported. The delegation, led by Deputy Commerce Minister Gao Hucheng and including officials from the Foreign Ministry and customs service, will meet with their Russian counterparts and representatives from Moscow City Hall, Chinese Embassy spokesman Li Hua said, Interfax reported. |
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SKY'S THE LIMIT
Alexander Belenky / The St. Petersburg Times
The Milost charity launches a new program aimed at finding partners among companies in the luxury sector with the release of balloons on Malaya Konyushennaya Ulitsa on Wednesday. |
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MOSCOW — Prime Minister Vladimir Putin on Wednesday ordered state-controlled Sberbank to keep lending even as the bank reported a rise in bad loans, Reuters reported. The government is looking to banks, especially state-controlled ones, to help the economy out of its first recession in a decade with affordable loans. In return, the sector has been given billions of dollars of state funds to help boost their capital as bad loans rise and asset values fall.
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10-Ruble Note to Go MOSCOW (SPT) — The Central Bank will begin phasing out the 10-ruble note this fall, a move that could save the budget 18 billion rubles ($577 million) over the next 10 years, the bank’s First Deputy Chairman Giorgy Luntovsky, told reporters Wednesday. “Coins are more expensive to make than bills, but they will stay in use longer,” Luntovsky said, adding that the life span of a 10-ruble note is one year, compared to nearly 30 years for a coin. Aeroflot Delays Jets MOSCOW (SPT) — Aeroflot said Wednesday that it was delaying the delivery of five new Airbus planes because of the fall in passenger numbers as Russia weathers its first recession in a decade, Reuters reported on Tuesday. |
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 MOSCOW — If the price of a Big Mac is any indication, Russia could have one of the world’s most undervalued currencies. For the past 20 years, The Economist has been publishing its Big Mac Index, which uses the cost of a McDonald’s Big Mac in various countries to determine the relative values of different currencies to the dollar. |
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MOSCOW —President Dmitry Medvedev on Tuesday called for both chambers of parliament to hold an extraordinary session in order to pass legislation that would create small innovative enterprises at universities. He also accused the government and parliament of “lack of coordination” after the Federation Council voted against a bill he backed with the prime minister on Monday. |
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MOSCOW — The government has drafted legislation that would make it easier for news agencies to contest plagiarism of their reports, drawing cheers from big outlets like Interfax and RIA-Novosti, but critics say the bill is too vague to be effective. |
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MOSCOW — A court on Tuesday extended the detention of Sunrise owner Sergei Bobylev, whose computer and appliance retailer ran what it called Europe’s largest hardware store, in a major fraud investigation that arose after a dispute with the company’s creditors.
Bobylev’s case is the latest in a string of recent crackdowns on the owners of major retail chains, including Yevroset and Arbat Prestige. |
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 Pushing the “reset” button on diplomatic relations is a popular endeavor nowadays. U.S. President Barack Obama just journeyed to Moscow in order to reset strained U.S.-Russian ties. The European Union, though not in need of a reset because of strained ties with its eastern neighbors, is involved in a deep strategic reconstruction of those relations. |
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The world now takes Russia seriously. When Russia first declared in 2005 that it had an energy weapon, Europe was incredulous. Since then, Russia has wielded that energy weapon more than once. |
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 It will certainly not be of help to those studying Russian history. The first act is sure to make most members of the audiences scratch their heads wondering how on earth this ditzy, at times hysterical woman, racing chaotically across the stage half-dressed and overwhelmed by emotions, managed to rule the state. |
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This month, the police continued to meddle with music concerts in Russia. The most talked-about incident took place in Saratov, a large city in southern Russia. |
 Artifacts from the Russian cruiser Varyag, which fought in the Russo-Japanese war, were brought to St. Petersburg last week from South Korea to be exhibited at the State Hermitage Museum. The exhibition is due to open on Saturday in the Georgievsky (St. |
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Brovar at first sight appears to be less of a restaurant than a convenient place to sample the local beer brand of the same name, and little more. The menu gives pride of place to the beer, which is produced in a microbrewery just outside of St. |
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 A group of local artists is taking its art into the street to make a statement, turning exhibitions into political protests and supplementing protests with its artwork. Having held two street shows in St. Petersburg late last month, they took their exhibition to Moscow at the weekend, where it was part of a demonstration in support of a young man persecuted by the police on Saturday. |
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Issues Archive