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Snow ploughs are now active on the streets of St. Petersburg, but vast amounts of snow and life-threatening icicles remained visible even in the center on Monday. On Friday, a woman was killed by a falling icicle on Prospekt Yuriya Gagarina in the south of the city, ABNews reported Monday. She died on the spot. The woman was the first fatality, while more than ten people have been injured by icicles and more than 500 have sustained injuries from falling over in streets, some of which have not been cleared since the heavy snowfalls in late December. Although City Governor Valentina Matviyenko and some local media referred to the record-breaking volume of snow that fell on Dec. |
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 President Dmitry Medvedev has outdone his popular predecessor Vladimir Putin — as an artist. A photograph taken by Medvedev of the Kremlin in the Siberian city of Tobolsk was sold for 51 million rubles ($1. |
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MOSCOW — A senior investigator was arrested over the weekend on suspicion of soliciting a $15 million bribe from the head of Rosenergomash, a leading electrical engineering manufacturer, the Investigative Committee said. Andrei Grivtsov, who is in charge of “particularly important cases” for the central investigation department of the Investigative Committee, is accused of demanding the money in exchange for not opening a criminal investigation into Rosenergomash president Vladimir Palikhata, Investigative Committee spokesman Vladimir Markin said. |
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The Dresden Opera Ball will be brought to St. Petersburg next fall, and Prime Minister Vladimir Putin will dance the opening waltz, a German media report said Friday. |
All photos from issue.
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 A St. Petersburg sculptor is casting a bronze bust of current prime minister and former president Vladimir Putin to add to the collection of sculptures of former Russian leaders owned by Californian governor Arnold Schwarzenegger. The bust has been commissioned by the Russian Bodybuilding and Fitness Federation as a gift for Schwarzenegger, who already has sculptures of Vladimir Lenin, Joseph Stalin, Mikhail Gorbachev and Boris Yeltsin, said the sculptor Alexander Chernoshchyokov. |
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A Novgorod court handed down prison sentences Friday to two Ingush natives convicted in the 2007 bombing of the Nevsky Express train, which derailed several railcars and injured dozens of passengers. |
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MOSCOW — The country dropped its long-standing blockade of a much-needed reform of the European Court of Human Rights on Friday when the State Duma ratified Protocol 14 to the European Convention on Human Rights. Deputies voted 392-56 for the reform, with opposition coming from the Communist and the Liberal Democrats’ factions, Interfax reported. The vote came as little surprise because United Russia, the ruling party that commands a two-thirds parliamentary majority, had announced in December that it would review its position after President Dmitry Medvedev asked deputies to take a fresh look at the matter. United Russia and the Foreign Ministry said the Council of Europe, the organization overseeing the court, had made concessions that addressed all their reservations. |
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 St. Petersburg’s Zenit Football Club wants to buy Russian soccer player Roman Pavlyuchenko, who is currently playing with London’s Tottenham Hotspurs. Introducing Zenit’s new manager, Luciano Spalletti, at a press conference on Monday, Zenit Football Club President Alexander Dukov said, “We’re ready to buy this soccer player. |
 Russian rescuers pulled out two young Haitian girls still alive from the ruins of a house Saturday, four days after a massive earthquake killed tens of thousands of people and destroyed Haiti’s capital. The rescuers, part of a team dispatched to the Caribbean island on four Emergency Situations Ministry jets last week, found the girls buried under rubble in Port-au-Prince. |
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MOSCOW — Russia and the United States have brought their positions closer over a new START treaty to curb strategic nuclear weapons, President Dmitry Medvedev said Saturday. |
 Prime Minister Vladimir Putin, determined to nurture a public image as a tough former KGB spy with bulging muscles and sometimes crude humor, has shown little tolerance for being parodied. Until now. Channel One viewers saw a cartoon Putin and President Dmitry Medvedev dancing and singing in a new animated show that debuted on New Year’s Eve and will become a twice-a-month fixture on the state-run television channel, starting at 10 p. |
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 An award-winning film about skinheads is causing a stir among prosecutors who cannot seem to decide whether it should be banned as extremist. Samara prosecutors asked a local court last year to ban the film, “Russia-88,” because of numerous ethnic slurs made by its characters. |
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 MOSCOW — Businessman Michael Cherney has been restricted from traveling abroad after an international warrant was issued for his arrest on accusations of money laundering and participating in organized crime. Cherney, also known as Mikhail Chernoi, said the accusations were engineered by Oleg Deripaska, whom he is suing in London for a stake in United Company RusAl. Information that an international warrant was issued for Cherney’s arrest was posted on Interpol’s web site, and the order was given by a Spanish court. The businessman has been implicated in a case involving the laundering of 4 million euros ($5. |
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TANKED UP
/ Reuters
Ruslan Mukanov, a 24-year-old Kazakh mechanic, refuels a replica of a Rolls Royce Phantom in Shakhtinsk. He created the car out of an old Mercedes in his garage at a cost of about $3,000. |
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MOSCOW — Consumer confidence in the fourth quarter of 2009 rose to the same level as a year earlier, according to data released Thursday, but sentiment has a long way to go before reaching precrisis levels. The State Statistics Service said its main confidence index increased to negative 20 percent, from negative 25 percent at the end of the third quarter.
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Yevroset Plans IPO MOSCOW (Bloomberg) — Yevroset, Russia’s largest handset retailer, plans to conduct an initial public offering next year, Kommersant reported, citing the company president. Yevroset will sell shares in 2011 “if the market is good,” Alexander Malis said in an interview published Monday in the Moscow-based newspaper. |
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MOSCOW — Some of the top Russia fund managers, fresh off 1,000 percent returns over the past decade, are saying the country’s stocks still look cheap compared with their emerging-market peers, and retailers, banks and consumer-goods makers are among the favorites for 2010. |
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Russia may stop importing poultry by 2015, Prime Minister Vladimir Putin said Thursday, backing a ban imposed on U.S. chicken imports at the beginning of the year. “We haven’t seen any readiness to meet Russian standards on the part of some of our partners, mainly the companies from the United States,” he said, chairing a meeting on poultry production in Snegirevka, in the Leningrad region. |
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MOSCOW — The Russian car market sunk by 49 percent last year, with annual sales falling to 1.47 million and expected to stay roughly the same in 2010, the Association of European Businesses said Thursday. |
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MOSCOW — The Russian edition of Forbes has won the use of the domain name Forbes.ru and a record $300,000 in damages from a cybersquatter in a landmark court ruling, the magazine announced Friday. Forbes and its Russian publisher, Axel Springer Russia, sued Landmark VIP Services, which advertises travel packages on Forbes. |
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 Although the official results of Ukraine’s presidential election have not yet been announced as we go to press, it has been clear all along that a second round of voting, on Feb. 7, will be needed to determine who will be the country’s next president — Viktor Yanukovych or Yulia Tymoshenko. |
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The long New Year’s holiday is a perfect time for the authorities to announce controversial and unpopular decisions. The Kremlin usually uses this trick to avoid unwanted criticism and debate. |
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Issues Archive