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MOSCOW — President Dmitry Medvedev arrived in Dushanbe on Thursday to kick off a trip intended to bolster his country’s influence in Central Asia, meeting with the leaders of Tajikistan, Afghanistan and Pakistan before a two-day security conference in Kyrgyzstan. According to the agenda for Medvedev’s trip released Wednesday by the Kremlin, he will hold talks with Tajik President Emomali Rakhmon and also meet with Afghan President Hamid Karzai and Pakistani President Asif Ali Zadari. The leaders will discuss regional cooperation and the possibility of selling Tajik electricity to Pakistan and Afghanistan. Tajikistan has a severe electricity deficit, however, and has struggled in the past to get through winters without rationing power use. |
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LIKE A VIRGIN
Alexander Belenky / The St. Petersburg Times
A guard stands on duty on Palace Square as the stage for Madonna's concert on Sunday is erected. Over 60 trucks of equipment have been brought to St. Petersburg for the singer's debut in St. Petersburg and only concert planned for Russia. See full story on page 6. |
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MOSCOW — Facing widespread mistrust over corruption and violence in its ranks, the Interior Ministry will now hold officials personally responsible for police leadership appointments, Interior Minister Rashid Nurgaliyev said Tuesday. The ministry also announced that candidates for police positions would be screened with lie detectors. But analysts predicted that the measures would fall far short of solving rampant corruption among the country’s police and were merely an attempt to soothe misgivings after an officer’s shooting spree earlier this year.
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The St. Petersburg-based Bureau of High-Rise and Underground Construction, or KB ViPS, has been selected as the local partner for the Canadian firm Diamond and Schmitt Architects in building Mariinsky II, the second stage for the Mariinsky Theater (see related story, page 5). |
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MOSCOW — Television channel TNT will appeal a court ruling ordering long-running reality show “Dom-2” to be shown only at night, after a group said it was offensive and should be covered by laws on erotica. |
All photos from issue.
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MOSCOW — Isa Yamadayev, a Chechen pro-Moscow opposition politician, said Wednesday that he was attacked in his Moscow apartment a day earlier, and investigators said a suspect had been detained. The attack follows a string of attacks on his family, including the killings of his brothers Ruslan, in September 2008, and Sulim, in March. “On Tuesday evening, a man came to my apartment in Moscow,” Yamadayev told Rosbalt news agency. “I asked him to enter the hall, but he took out a gun and shot me in the back.” Yamadayev refused to say whether he was wounded but said his life was saved by the actions of the Moscow police and that the gunman was detained. Police initially denied the attack, with a law enforcement source telling Interfax that it had “no evidence concerning someone firing a gun at Yamadayev. |
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CIRCUS STAR
Alexander Belenky / The St. Petersburg Times
A cheetah due to appear in a show program at the Yubileiny Sports Palace that will run throughout August featuring numerous international circus acts. |
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MOSCOW — An unknown gunman has shot and seriously wounded one of the country’s most notorious reputed crime bosses in a mysteriously botched sniper attack. Vyacheslav Ivankov, better known as Yaponchik and dubbed the godfather of the Russian mafia, was gunned down late Tuesday when he was leaving the Thai Elephant restaurant in the city’s northwest, investigators said Wednesday.
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MOSCOW — Ukraine is openly continuing to supply Georgia with arms, and despite President Dmitry Medvedev’s order that those supplying weapons to Tbilisi face sanctions, Russia appears to be in no hurry to carry out the threat. Eduard Kokoity, president of breakaway South Ossetia, said Monday that the United States, Ukraine and Israel were still arming Georgia. In early July, Ukrainian newspaper Segodnya published an interview with Sergei Bondarchuk, chief of state arms exporter Ukrspetsexport, in which he said they were continuing to fulfill arms contracts signed earlier with Georgia. Medvedev signed an order in January banning Russian companies from supplying arms to Georgia. |
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 BAIKALSK — The cellulose factory in Baikalsk once employed 2,200 people and was the lifeblood for the town on the shore of Russia’s Lake Baikal and a symbol of Soviet-era industrialization. |
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 MOSCOW — Igor Artemyev, chief of the government’s anti-monopoly watchdog, becomes livid when he talks about gasoline, threatening endless lawsuits for oil producers that refuse to temper their appetite for high prices at the pump. The Federal Anti-Monopoly Service has been waging court battles against the country’s largest oil companies ever since Prime Minister Vladimir Putin excoriated the watchdog last July, urging officials there to “wake up” or face the ax. |
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MOSCOW — Gasoline prices increased 8.8 percent over the month of June, topping almost 23 rubles per liter for 95-octane, the State Statistics Service reported — an increase that has renewed fears that oil companies may be fixing gasoline prices. |
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MOSCOW — The country’s airline industry saw passenger numbers slump by nearly a fifth in the first six months of 2009, although the depth of the slowdown eased in June, the Federal Air Transportation Agency said Wednesday, Reuters reported. Russians are tightening their belts because of rising unemployment and lack of confidence, while a weaker ruble has made foreign holidays less affordable than last year. Some airlines are struggling with losses, starting restructuring talks or are close to bankruptcy. Recent economic data suggest, however, that the worst of the slowdown may have passed, and airline figures support this. In June, national airlines carried 4. |
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 MOSCOW — Travelers entering the country with $10,000 or more may soon have to explain the origin of their money and its intended use, the Federal Customs Service said in a statement on its web site. |
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Discount carriers could face restrictions to their access of Pulkovo Airport following complaints by a local airline. At a Monday meeting on changes to St. Petersburg’s strategy for the development of its transportation and logistical complex, Rossia airlines head Roman Pakhomov said that while the plans being discussed specified bringing discount carriers to Pulkovo, they did not offer any support for St. |
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Russia Key for Lufthansa MOSCOW — Lufthansa, Europe’s second-biggest airline, said Russia is still one of its key destinations even as the global recession hurts demand for flights there more than in some other markets, said Ronald Schulz, Lufthansa’s regional director for Russia, Reuters reported. |
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 The Kremlin has been caught off guard by a spike in violence in the North Caucasus over the past few months. One reason for this: The Kremlin had believed its policies in the region were successful. After canceling its anti-terrorist operations in Chechnya (largely at the insistence of Chechen President Ramzan Kadyrov), the authorities were convinced that the situation there had stabilized. |
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I live in a small dacha community where all the drivers yield the right of way to each other in a friendly, neighborly fashion. Someone driving a Mercedes-Benz is just as likely to give way to let a Zhiguli pass as the other way around. |
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 The renowned Canadian architectural firm Diamond and Schmitt Architects were announced as the winners this month of an international competition to design Mariinsky II, Russia’s first new grand-scale opera house since before the Bolshevik Revolution. The company has already signed a contract with the Russian government, which will finance the $452 million project. |
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Peter Gabriel dedicated a song to the slain Russian human rights activist Natalya Estemirova during his headline performance at this year’s WOMAD festival on Saturday. |
 St. Petersburg communists and Russian airborne forces hope to stake out a bit of the glory when the Queen of Pop performs in St. Petersburg on Sunday. Record-breaking pop star Madonna will give a concert on the city’s Palace Square at 7 p.m. Sunday. As the grandiose musical spectacle will take place directly next to the Winter Palace, the site of the overthrow of the provisional government by Bolshevik forces in the October Revolution of 1917, a group of local communists is calling on the singer to commemorate the event in her performance. |
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Images of dead seagulls crawling with flies and ants projected onto large flat-screen TVs surrounding the table may not be everyone’s idea of appetizing. |
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Ïðåññ-êîíôåðåíöèÿ: press conference Could everyone who is sick of politics please raise your hand? (Thousands of arms shoot up.) I’m sick of the subject, too. (Pleased murmurs fill the hall.) But (loud groan) the thing is, I keep finding all these weird political translation problems. |
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Issues Archive