LOCAL NEWS

Katyn Commemorations Mark ‘Turnaround’ in Relations

KATYN MEMORIAL, Smolensk Region — Prime Minister Vladimir Putin and his Polish counterpart, Donald Tusk, paid tribute Wednesday to the thousands of Poles massacred here 70 years ago by Soviet secret police, the first joint ceremony ever held at the mass grave.

The two walked solemnly through the pine forest to a towering memorial inscribed with the names of Polish officers executed in the spring of 1940, an atrocity that the Soviet Union blamed on the Nazis for decades.

NATIONAL NEWS

NEW UNIT TO FIGHT CAUCASUS TERRORISM

MOSCOW — President Dmitry Medvedev ordered the creation of a new anti-terrorism unit in the restive North Caucasus on Wednesday as new details emerged about the Moscow suicide bombers.

Medvedev told Federal Security Service director Alexander Bortnikov, Interior Minister Rashid Nurgaliyev and Investigative Committee head Alexander Bastrykin to create the permanent unit by April 19, the Kremlin said Wednesday on its web site.

The new group will be tasked with preventing terrorist attacks like last week’s twin bombings in the Moscow metro that killed 40 people and injured 121 others.

The two women who carried out the bombings have been identified as natives of Dagestan.

KHODORKOVSKY TAKES CENTER STAGE IN COURT

MOSCOW — Former Yukos chief Mikhail Khodorkovsky, facing another 22 1/2 years in jail on charges that he stole more than $30 billion in oil, took the stand Tuesday for the first time in a year, sparring with prosecutors and playing to the crowd.

ST. PETERSBURG METRO TO LINK TICKET PRICES TO NEW ZONES

The St. Petersburg metro network plans to introduce a zoning system for the pricing of journeys by the end of the year.

The St. Petersburg Metropolitan announced the opening this week of a contest for the design and manufacture of an automatic control system that will establish the prices of tickets on the basis of new zones.

IN BRIEF

Chichvarkina Inquest

MOSCOW (SPT) — Investigators ruled Wednesday that the weekend death of the 60-year-old mother of former Yevroset owner Yevgeny Chichvarkin was an accident.

LOCAL BUSINESS

EXPERTS CALL FOR RUSSIA TO FOCUS ON STRENGTHS

In the current financial situation, Russia should invest more in spheres in which it has traditionally occupied a leading position rather than trying to catch up in all fields, say representatives of the St. Petersburg Union of Entrepreneurs and Manufacturers.

IN BRIEF

Ukraine Gas Imports

Bloomberg KIEV — Ukraine plans to increase natural-gas imports from Gazprom by 8.3 percent more than expected this year, the Fuel and Energy Ministry said.

OPINION

FROM PUSHKIN TO DEMOCRACY

I have recently returned from a two-week visit to Moscow where I gave lectures to university students studying international relations at the Higher School of Economics, Moscow State University and the Moscow State Institute of International Relations. While their views are not representative of all Russians —the students themselves readily acknowledged this — they were nonetheless extremely interesting and a very hopeful sign.

While critical of U.S. foreign policy, the young Russians I spoke to very much want Russia to have good relations with the United States and the West. They see this as being in Russia’s national interest and in their own personal interest as well.

A TREATY WITH NO LOSERS

More than a year has passed since U.S. Vice President Joe Biden announced at the Munich security conference a “reset” in U.S.-Russian relations. Five months after Biden’s speech, Russia allowed the United States and other NATO allies to transport supplies through Russian territory to Afghanistan, and this was a welcome breakthrough in bilateral relations.

Killers-in-Law

Lyudmila Chichvarkina, the mother of former Yevroset owner Yevgeny Chichvarkin, died in her Moscow apartment Saturday.

Law enforcement officials claim it was an accident, that she slipped on a kitchen tile, banged her head on the edge of a glass table and died of her injuries. But she did not die immediately.

CULTURE

TAKING FLIGHT

The Mariinsky Theater’s top-flight dancers Diana Vishneva, Ulyana Lopatkina, Viktoria Tereshkina and Leonid Sarafanov will spend the next ten days performing alongside foreign celebrities, dancing both cutting-edge new works and venerable classics.

Mathieu Ganio (Opera de Paris), Alina Cojocaru (Royal Opera House, Covent Garden), Polina Semionova (Staatsballett Berlin), Daniil Simkin and David Hallberg (American Ballet Theater) will visit St.

CHERNOV’S CHOICE

China secretly banned concerts by Bob Dylan, perhaps due to the U.S. singer/songwriter’s past as a counterculture icon and spokesman for a generation, The Guardian reported this week.

QUEEN AND COUNTRY

One of the oldest clubs in Russia celebrated its 240th anniversary last month with a lavish celebration at the Cappella Concert Hall.

The prestigious St. Petersburg English Club was founded on March 1, 1770 by the Englishman John Gardener, a merchant in the imperial capital, according to Andrei Galenko, chairman of the club.

ITALIAN JOB

The Russian-Italian couple that gave St. Petersburg the popular ice-cream lovers’ heaven, Cafe Venice on Stary Nevsky, opened a new caf? in February just a short walk from Ploshchad Vosstaniya.

WORLD

Official: U.S. Military Reviewing Iraq Video

WASHINGTON — US military lawyers are reviewing a video of an Apache helicopter attack in 2007 in Baghdad that killed two Reuters employees to verify if the footage is genuine, according to a defense official.

The review at U.S. Central Command came after the whistleblower website WikiLeaks posted graphic gun camera footage on Monday that it said showed the attack on a Baghdad street.