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MOSCOW — Russia will sharply increase imports of agricultural goods this season and may become a net importer of grain for the first time in 11 years as a severe drought continues to ravage the harvest, analysts said Wednesday. The possibility comes just over a year after Russia pledged to double grain exports within 15 years to help improve global food security. Local grain powerhouses Ukraine and Kazakhstan were invited in June 2009 to help Russia form a supply pool that would stabilize prices and boost export opportunities. Imports of barley alone — a key ingredient for the country’s booming beer industry — may rise more than tenfold to 700,000 tons this marketing year, from 50,000 tons a year before, according to SovEcon, an agricultural market researcher. |
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OPEN SEASON
Alexander Belenky / The St. Petersburg Times
A band performs on Sennaya Polshchad as part of the Savior of the Apple Feast Day festivities on Thursday. The Russian Orthodox Church celebrates the day as the Transfiguration of Christ, though in folk tradition it marks the day from which apples can be eaten. |
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Weather Warning ST. PETERSBURG (SPT) — Night frosts and heavy winds during the day are being predicted for the coming week by weather forecasters, Fontanka.ru reported. The St. Petersburg Center for Hydrometeorology and Environmental Monitoring has predicted air and soil temperatures to fall as low as minus 2 degrees Celsius on Friday night.
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ST. PETERSBURG — A Muslim lawyer’s attempt to create St. Petersburg’s first sharia court flopped just weeks after the court opened amid a storm of criticism from local Muslim leaders and human rights activists that climaxed with an order from prosecutors for its closure. |
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MOSCOW — When FIFA officials decide who will host the 2018 World Cup in December, the seemingly worst candidate just might beat European football giants like England, Spain and the Netherlands. |
All photos from issue.
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MOSCOW — More than 100 foreign tourists experienced a short-lived Titanic-like scare on the Volga River early Wednesday when their luxury cruise ship sailing from Moscow to St. Petersburg collided with a sand-laden barge. None of the 111 tourists from the United States, Germany and Italy were injured, while three of the 91 crew members sustained minor bruises during the incident on the Rybinskoye reservoir on the Volga River in the Yaroslavl region, emergency officials said. But the ship, the Sergei Kirov, suffered a 5-meter-long gash along its hull, and the crew prevented it from sinking, officials said. |
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TAKING A STAND
Alexander Belenky / The St. Petersburg Times
A participant in the vigil protecting the city’s parliament during the failed coup of Aug. 19, 1991, attends an unsanctioned meeting to mark the event’s anniversary on St. Isaac’s Square on Thursday. |
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MOSCOW — Moscow police went on alert Wednesday after a shock car bombing injured 29 people in Pyatigorsk, a southern city that acts as headquarters for the North Caucasus Federal District. Police said they were closely monitoring railway and metro stations, airports and other public places, and searching buses arriving from the country’s south. A bomb scare prompted the evacuation of about 1,000 people from the World Trade Center Moscow and the adjacent Crowne Plaza Hotel on 12 Krasnopresnenskaya Naberezhnaya.
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 MOSCOW — A Moscow businessman has demanded that the Interior Ministry return 15 million rubles ($492,000) that he says he provided to implicate a Kremlin official in a sting operation — and that disappeared after the suspect accepted it in front of police officers. Vladimir Morozov sent his letter to Interior Minister Rashid Nurgaliyev on Friday, two days after an investigation was opened into the Kremlin official, Vladimir Leshchevsky, deputy head of construction in the Office of Presidential Affairs, Kommersant reported Thursday. |
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MOSCOW — Soyuzmultfilm will resume its 16-year battle Wednesday to regain the rights to its beloved catalog of Soviet cartoons, seeking to invalidate a 1992 agreement under which it transferred roughly 1,200 films to a U.S. company. The state-run studio has filed a suit in the Moscow Arbitration Court seeking to cancel its contract with California-based Films by Jove. |
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MOSCOW — Countrywide car sales jumped 50 percent year-on-year in July, making Russia the third-largest European auto market, thanks in large part to the government’s cash-for-clunkers program, a report said Tuesday. |
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MOSCOW — Murtaza Rakhimov, who recently resigned his post of president of Bashkortostan, will help holding company Sistema manage Bashneft as part of the oil producer’s board of directors. Two executives at Sistema and a source close to the oil company told Vedomosti about the coming election of Rakhimov to Bashneft’s board of directors. |
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 The “frozen conflicts” in the post-Soviet space have largely lived up to their name over the past two decades. Two years ago, Russian intervention brought one set of conflicts — Georgia’s disputes with separatist regions Abkhazia and South Ossetia — to a dangerous boiling point. |
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The Shatursky district has the distinction of being one of the few areas in the Moscow region where not a single home or person suffered from the fires, despite the fact that the area had more dried-out peat bogs — and was thus more fire-prone — than other districts in the region. |
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Some of Russia’s leading bands, both from St. Petersburg and Moscow, will perform at an outdoor protest concert at Pushkinskaya Ploshchad in Moscow on Sunday to support the defenders of Khimki forest — threatened by the Prime Minister Vladimir Putin-backed plans to build a new, paid highway between Moscow and St. Petersburg. From St. Petersburg, DDT and Televizor will perform, while Moscow will be represented by Barto and Otzvuki Mu. More acts are to be confirmed. The people defending the forest say that it’s being destroyed primarily in order to create space for elite cottages close to the planned road, as there are alternative routes for the highway that would spare the forest. |
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/ For The St. Petersburg Times
Ewan McGregor (pictured) and Kim Cattrall star in Roman Polanski’s political thriller ‘The Ghost Writer,’ showing now at local movie theaters. |
 Escaping the smog in Moscow has been everyone’s top priority this month, and show-business stars have been no exception. Eurovision-winning pop singer Dima Bilan hissingly compared Moscow to “Chernobyl” on Twitter: “I’ve just come back from Israel, and what is going on here?” he wrote. “It’s just like Chernobyl. I’ll think about where to hide.” “Everyone who has to live through the smog and smoke in Moscow should be paid alimony for becoming disabled,” he added.
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 Seven portraits of young noblewomen who studied at the Smolny Institute painted more than 230 years ago go on display Friday at the State Russian Museum. The exhibition, titled “Smolyanki,” is dedicated to the 275th anniversary of the birth of their creator, the artist Dmitry Levitsky. |
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The abbreviation D.F.M. may be known to some as a group of Moscow radio stations that play mostly dance, R’n’B and Hip Hop. As we descended down the stairs into the subterranean D. |
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YUVINO, Ryazan Region — Maria Gladchenko was looking forward to her vacation — a rafting trip down a river in Marii-El. Instead, along with a dozen other volunteers, she found herself hauling 20 liters of water around a charred pine forest in the Ryazan region. “My vacation has been spoiled because Marii-El is on fire,” Gladchenko said. |
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 GHAZI AIR BASE, Pakistan — The world ramped up assistance to flood-ravaged Pakistan on Thursday three weeks after the crisis began, and U.S. Sen. John Kerry said Washington did not want Islamist extremists to come out of the disaster stronger. The U.S. |
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MONTERREY, Mexico — The kidnapped mayor of a northern Mexican town was found dead Wednesday, extending a rash of deadly attacks on political figures in an area besieged by drug gang battles. |
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URUMQI, China — A bomb attack killed seven people and wounded 14 Thursday in China’s far west region of Xinjiang, an area beset by ethnic conflict and separatist violence. The target of the attack wasn’t known, although an overseas activist for the region’s native Uighur ethnic group said the victims included members of the security forces. |
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BERLIN — It was a big shot. A big hog. And a big disappointment. When Georg van Bebber hauled back his wild boar from Ebersberg forest near Munich after a day of hunting, he was exhilarated about his impressive prey. |
Temp: -1°C clear 
Issues Archive