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About a hundred OMON special task police officers stormed the offices of a major St. Petersburg translation company, barring employees from leaving or going to the toilet for at least ten hours on Thursday. Masked officers detained about 180 employees of Ego Translating in their office, located at 2 Muchnoi Pereulok in central St. Petersburg, without offering any explanation of who they were or what the reason for the search was, Viktoria Uznanska, vice president of Ego Translating, told The St. Petersburg Times by phone on Thursday. “The officers, armed with crowbars and guns, isolated the staff in different rooms and refused them access to food, drink and the toilet,” Uznanska said. “There are two pregnant women among those trapped, and they are not allowed to use the toilet either,” she said. |
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BEAR NECESSITIES
Alexei Nikolsky / Pool / RIA Novosti / Reuters
Prime Minister Vladimir Putin (r) attaches a tracking collar to a 230-kilogram polar bear as he assists in research on Franz Josef Land island in the Barents Sea on Thursday. |
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Yevgeny Plushenko on Thursday found himself under fire from the St. Petersburg Legislative Assembly, which is threatening to strip the medal-winning Olympic figure skater of his seat in the local parliament, where he represents the A Just Russia faction. The city parliament had originally planned a vote to decide the fate of Plushenko’s mandate, when the assembly’s speaker Vadim Tyulpanov of United Russia intervened on Wednesday, suggesting that the lawmakers send an official notification to Sergei Mironov, the leader of the A Just Russia party.
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MOSCOW — Police officers’ salaries will triple and their work will face tighter public scrutiny under a sweeping overhaul of the country’s police force ordered by President Dmitry Medvedev, officials said Wednesday. State Duma Deputy Alexander Gurov said the plans mark the biggest reform of the police since the Soviet collapse and compared its urgency with an incident in the 1970s when he shot dead a lion as a young police lieutenant. |
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MOSCOW — Vedomosti on Tuesday sued State Duma Speaker Boris Gryzlov for accusing it of siding with Chechen rebels, marking the first time in at least a decade that a Russian newspaper has filed a defamation suit against such a high-ranking official. |
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Zhirinovsky Fined MOSCOW (SPT) — Vladimir Zhirinovsky, leader of the Liberal Democratic Party, was fined 1 million rubles ($34,000) by Moscow’s Savyolovsky District Court on Wednesday for defaming Mayor Yury Luzhkov and City Hall on television, Interfax reported. Zhirinovsky is being punished for calling city officials “a Moscow mafia” last October and for saying “everything is tied up by a single man — the Moscow mayor. |
All photos from issue.
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 Ukraine’s parliament ratified a deal to extend the lease on Russia’s naval base Tuesday in a riotous session where the opponents of the measure engaged in fistfights, hurled smoke bombs and tossed eggs at the speaker. While hailed by President Dmitry Medvedev and his Ukrainian counterpart Viktor Yanukovych, the deal was described as a “dark page in Ukraine’s history” by Ukraine’s chief opposition leader Yulia Tymoshenko, who called for early elections to the legislature. |
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 MOSCOW — Almost six years have passed since Igor Gulyev, a 22-year-old entrepreneur at the time, bought a two-room apartment in a soon-to-be-completed house in Yubileiny, a town in the Moscow region. |
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MOSCOW — The Federal Security Service could get more power to intimidate citizens and punish them for not complying with what is vaguely described as “legitimate demands” from its officers, according to a government-drafted bill. The bill, submitted to the State Duma on Saturday, is apparently aimed at lending more legitimacy to the FSB’s informal ways of work. |
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Kyrgyzstan’s interim government said Tuesday that it had charged ousted President Kurmanbek Bakiyev with “mass killing” and has formally prepared an extradition request, Reuters reported. |
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 Hewlett-Packard and component maker Foxconn opened a pilot assembly line to make computers in St. Petersburg on Wednesday, but the partners offered few details on when their main production facility would be finished. The companies were also reluctant to discuss the economic viability of the project, which they first announced in May 2008. |
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Rezidor Hotel Group opened a third Park Inn hotel in St. Petersburg on Monday. The new Park Inn Nevsky hotel, located on Nevsky Prospekt just behind Ploshchad Vosstaniya, has added another 270 rooms to the local chain, Rezidor Hotel Group said. |
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The financial crisis did not prevent Lufthansa Group from increasing the number of its passengers traveling from St. Petersburg by about 20,000 in 2009 compared to 2008, Lufthansa representatives said Wednesday. “Last year our group of Lufthansa, Swiss and Austrian airlines transported about 500,000 people from the city, proving once again that the inclusion of other airlines into our group had a positive effect,” Bart Buyse, Lufthansa’s regional manager for St. |
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MOSCOW — Digital Sky Technologies Limited will buy the ICQ chat service from AOL for $187 million, the companies said Wednesday. The purchase of ICQ is a strategic step in the development of DST’s business in Russia and Eastern Europe, Yury Milner, DST’s founder, said in a statement. |
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MOSCOW — Russia finally became a Caspian Sea oil producer on Wednesday as LUKoil began operating a modest offshore field in the presence of Prime Minister Vladimir Putin, who smeared some of the crude across his cheeks in celebration. Kazakhstan and Azerbaijan have led the efforts to tap the sea’s energy resources by enlisting such industry majors as ExxonMobil, BP and Chevron. |
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MOSCOW — Dunkin’ Donuts, the U.S. eatery that left Russia after a three-year stint in the 1990s, has returned to Moscow with big plans for rapid expansion. |
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 When airports across Europe reopened after the closure caused by the eruption of Iceland’s Eyjafjallajokull volcano, it was not because the amount of ash in the atmosphere had dropped, but because the risk that the ash posed to airplane safety had been reassessed. |
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During the height of the Eyjafjallajokull volcano crisis last week, air traffic over Europe was paralyzed, and losses to the air travel industry reached $200 million per day. |
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 Isaak Levitan’s legacy is the depiction of Russian nature in an unprecedented light. Many of the landscape painter’s predecessors had failed to find inspiration in Russia’s gray and dreary landscapes, preferring instead to imitate more colorful Italian and French paintings. |
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The local scene has begun a revival after the winter, which proved cruel to a number of venues, in particular the clubs located in a former Soviet taxi park on Konyushennaya Ploshchad that had to close in January because the building’s owner had different plans for the premises. |
 The final performances last weekend of this year’s Mariinsky International Ballet Festival were full of rewarding novelties and great dancing. The festival, celebrating its 10th anniversary, closed triumphantly last Sunday night with its traditional gala featuring international stars. |
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Sennaya Ploshchad just isn’t what it used to be. The riff-raff and undesirable characters are (mostly) gone, edged out by the shimmering facade of the Pik shopping mall, innumerable blini and shaverma stands and endless pedestrian traffic. |
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