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 MOSCOW — The devastating wildfires have shown severe shortcomings in Russia’s firefighting organization, deficits that are all the more bizarre because until recently the country possessed one of the world’s biggest task forces specialized in combating burning woods and fields. That organization, the Aerial Forest Protection Center, or Avialesokhrana, employed some 9,000 firefighters specially trained and equipped to put out wildfires in Soviet times. Most of them were so-called smokejumpers, who fly and parachute right into remote fire-hit areas. In the 1990s, their number was slashed to about 4,000, and in 2007, the center was reduced to the status of a monitoring agency, with just 1,800 personnel left at its disposal. This summer’s catastrophic fires have shown that the reform was a failure and the best way out is to re-establish a unified wildfire fighting center, Andrei Yeritsov, deputy director of the Aerial Forest Protection Center, said Wednesday. |
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R.I.P.
Alexander Belenky / The St. Petersburg Times
Igor Kurdin, chairman of the St. Petersburg Submariners Club, attends a remembrance service on Thursday at the St. Nicholas Cathedral for those killed in the Kursk Submarine tragedy which took place 10 years ago. |
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MOSCOW — United Company RusAl stepped up its game in an ongoing dispute over the fate of Norilsk Nickel on Wednesday, as it filed a request to a London court to arbitrate its conflict with fellow Norilsk shareholder Interros. RusAl has accused Interros of foul play since the aluminum major lost a seat on Norilsk’s board in a June election, and since then the two have been engaged in a high-profile feud that will likely end with a change in the shareholder structure.
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The scandal surrounding the site of the Vavilov Horticultural Research Institute in Pavlovsk is escalating dramatically. The institute lost its case in Moscow’s Arbitration Court and now looks set to lose its land, which is home to more than 4,000 fruit and berry species, some of which have become extinct in their natural environments. |
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MOSCOW — Chechen rebels claimed responsibility Thursday for a small explosion this week near Gazprom’s headquarters in southwestern Moscow, Reuters reported. |
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MOSCOW — A dramatic nighttime shootout between policemen and car thieves in southwestern Moscow early Thursday left two people dead and two others injured — and was captured on a video posted on YouTube. A three-member police patrol caught two thieves breaking into a car but came under gunfire after approaching them, RIA-Novosti reported. |
All photos from issue.
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MOSCOW — Prime Minister Vladimir Putin took the pilot’s seat in the government’s fight against wildfires Tuesday, hopping on a firefighting plane to put out two blazes in the Ryazan region. Putin, wearing a blue shirt and jeans, boarded a Russian-built Be-200 amphibious aircraft as a passenger for a flight over the Ryazan region. |
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MOSCOW — A cart driver detained on suspicion of stabbing two police officers to death in the Voronezh region this week was trying to protect his pregnant fiancee from the drunken officers’ blows, the tabloid Lifenews. |
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Casino Zone May Close MOSCOW (Bloomberg) — Russia may close its only operating casino zone because neither gamblers nor investors have shown interest in the remote location in the country’s south, Vedomosti said, citing industry officials. Alexander Tkachev, governor of the Krasnodar region, urged President Dmitry Medvedev to have the zone moved to the Black Sea resort of Anapa, which has more tourists and potential gamblers, from Azov, Vedomosti said. |
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 On July 31, several hundred pro-democracy activists congregated in a Moscow square to protest government restrictions on freedom of assembly. They were promptly surrounded by police officers, who tried to break up the demonstration. A leading critic of the Kremlin and several others were hastily dragged into a police car and driven away. |
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On Aug. 1, Chechen militant Doku Umarov — head of the Caucasus Emirate, an umbrella group loosely connecting rebels in the North Caucasus republics — announced his voluntary resignation and named Aslambek Vadalov, an obscure mid-ranking Chechen rebel, as his successor. |
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 The city’s vegan community is set to get a unique new addition to its scene Friday with the opening of V-Club. The organizers of the club say they want to popularize a way of life based on spiritual and physical self-improvement, and tell visitors about health and moral attitudes to animals and nature. “Our objective isn’t to earn money,” said Mikhail Semyonov, one of the organizers. “V” stands for vegan — people who refuse to eat or use any products of animal origin. The club is not only for practicing vegans, however — organizers welcome everybody who would like to get more information about the movement. |
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/ For The St. Petersburg Times
Nikolai Roerich’s ‘Celestial Battle’ (1912) is one of the works on display at the ‘Sky in Art’ exhibition at the Russian Museum. |
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Despite a campaign launched by musician Mikhail Borzykin of Televizor in support of the imprisoned rapper Noize MC — which garnered more than 850 signatures from musicians, artists and journalists — he was not released until he had served his full 10 days in a Volgograd jail. Ivan Alexeyev — Noize MC’s real name — was charged with “disorderly conduct” during his set at an outdoor festival, when the local police took offence to the rapper mocking them with a song and improvised rap and arrested him immediately after the show.
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At the end of July, Channel One started a new game show called “Lie Detector,” where contestants have to truthfully answer questions to win a cash prize of one million rubles ($33,086). The first contestants should really have been the members of the U. |
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With a menu comprising a wide range of traditional Russian dishes, this “Soviet” cafe on Nevsky Prospekt attempts to give visitors an experience of life in the Soviet Union during the 1960s and ’70s. |
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PARIS — Plastic surgery patients have carried a new class of superbugs resistant to almost all antibiotics from South Asia to Britain and they could spread worldwide, researchers reported Wednesday. Many hospital infections that were already difficult to treat have become even more impervious to drugs thanks to a recently discovered gene that can jump across different species of bacteria. |
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 Wednesday’s friendly match between Russia and Bulgaria (1:0) was supposed to be the beginning of a new era in Russian soccer. The team’s first game under new manager Dick Advocaat was intended as a signpost, hopefully pointing to a successful Euro 2012 in Poland and Ukraine. The Dutchman Advocaat replaced his compatriot, Guus Hiddink, after Russia failed to qualify for the 2010 World Cup in South Africa. |
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