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MOSCOW — A Gazprom-led consortium gave a final approval to the underwater part of the 10 billion euro ($12.7 billion) South Stream gas pipeline, the gas giant said Thursday.
Gazrpom also separately cleared the final hurdle for the pipeline's overland leg.
The board of the South Stream Transport consortium convened in Milan on Wednesday and made a final investment decision that paves the way for construction of the underwater section, Gazprom said in a statement.
Italy's Eni, France's EDF and Germany's BASF joined Gazprom in the consortium, which they decided Wednesday to register in Amsterdam.
The consortium plans to break ground on the project near Anapa on Dec. |
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 MINSK — The Belarussian government has thrown open its doors to foreign investors by lifting restrictions on the privatization of state-owned companies. |
 MOSCOW — Dozens of protesters gathered outside the Investigative Committee headquarters Thursday and demanded that opposition activists Leonid Razvozzhayev and Konstantin Lebedev be released from jail.
A criminal case against the two senior Left Front members was opened last month following allegations in a state television program that they plotted riots with a Georgian power broker.
At Thursday’s “Occupy” rally, protesters also called for the release of several people detained on allegations of inciting violence at a May 6 opposition rally on Bolotnaya Ploshchad, saying the government crackdown on the opposition had gone too far. |
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 MOSCOW — When President Vladimir Putin was asked in an interview last month about anti-corruption lawyer Alexei Navalny, he indicated that he thought opposition leaders had achieved little of substance. |
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MOSCOW — The Foreign Ministry on Thursday responded to the advancement of the Magnitsky Act in the U.S. House of Representatives by issuing a warning of retaliation.
The bill, which seeks to punish Russian officials involved in the jail death of anti-corruption lawyer Sergei Magnitsky, is expected to come up for vote in the House on Friday.
Russia will get back at the United States if the bill becomes law, Foreign Ministry spokesman Alexander Lukashevich said.
"We will have to react, and it will be a tough reaction," he said, Interfax reported.
He did not specify what the government had in mind, saying only that Russia's response would depend on the final content of the "unfriendly and provocative" legislation and cover the complete range of bilateral ties. |
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 MOSCOW – Angela Merkel faces a seemingly impossible task in Moscow on Friday.
During the course of a visit scheduled for just eight hours, the German chancellor is expected to mend serious rifts in mutual ties while at the same time telling President Vladimir Putin that the crackdown on the opposition is going too far. |
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MOSCOW – The Kremlin remained silent Wednesday after U.S. lawmakers moved to advance a bill to punish Russian officials for human rights violations.
A decision Tuesday by the House Rules Committee will bring the bill, which aroused strong opposition in Moscow, up for a vote by the full House later this week.
The committee decided to combine the human rights legislation, known as the Magnitsky Act, with a bill that would grant Russia permanent normal trade relations, or PNTR.
The full House is expected to vote Thursday on the plan to merge the bills and could consider the combined package Friday, Reuters reported.
Moscow has long campaigned against the Magnitsky bill, warning that it would damage relations between the countries. |
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 MOSCOW – Amendments expanding the legal definition of treason came into effect Wednesday despite a presidential pledge two days before that the clause would be reconsidered. |
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MOSCOW – President Vladimir Putin has given his approval to plans for the relocation of the Supreme Court, the Supreme Arbitration Court and the Supreme Court's judicial department from Moscow to St. Petersburg, though he stressed that no final decision had been made. |
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MOSCOW – Amid a Defense Ministry shakeup, President Vladimir Putin replaced two deputy defense ministers Thursday as former Defense Minister Anatoly Serdyukov reportedly joined Russian Technologies as an adviser. |
All photos from issue.
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New Defense Minister Sergei Shoigu has put on hold the planned transfer of St. Petersburg’s Military Medical Academy (VMA) from its historical central location to a city suburb.
The decision to transfer one of Russia’s leading military medicine schools and hospitals, announced by Shoigu’s predecessor at the beginning of this year, elicited a wave of protests in St. Petersburg. Both the city’s political opposition and representatives of the ruling United Russia party spoke against the move. The city parliament appealed to then-President Dmitry Medvedev to investigate the situation.
Sergei Andenko, a deputy of the St. Petersburg Legislative Assembly, said the defense ministry’s latest statement referred not only to freezing the VMA’s move, but also to the termination of the whole reform of Russia’s military medical system, Fontanka. |
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LUCKY CATCH
ALEXANDER BELENKY / SPT
A hooded crow intervenes successfully as a woman feeds pigeons while walking over a bridge on Yelagin Island during one of the first snowfalls in the city
earlier this month. No more snow is forecast in the near future, with temperatures predicted to reach a balmy 8 degrees Celsius on Wednesday and Thursday. |
 St. Petersburg’s Grand Choral Synagogue will hold an open doors day on Sunday, Nov. 18 to mark International Tolerance Day.
The event is open to all city residents, regardless of their religion and nationality, and allows members of the public to visit the synagogue and get acquainted with Jewish culture. Visitors will be able to take guided excursions around the site, learning about the synagogue’s architecture, Jewish wedding traditions and other interesting facts about the city’s Jewish community.
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A local energy company has filed a lawsuit in the city’s arbitration court claiming that Lenfilm is bankrupt because it can’t pay up around 2 million rubles ($63,000) that it owes for energy use.
In September, the arbitration court upheld the rights of state-owned Fuel and Energy Complex of St. |
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Less Crime in City
ST. PETERSBURG (SPT) — St. Petersburg has become one of the safest cities in Russia, St. Petersburg Governor Georgy Poltavchenko claimed last week. |
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MOSCOW — President Vladimir Putin’s human rights council gained 39 new members on Monday as its total membership count rose from 40 to 62 in a reshuffle that saw more than a dozen leave.
A longtime head of the council told The St. Petersburg Times that, in its expanded form, the panel would have a hard time coming to “consolidated decisions linked by a single logic.”
Ella Pamfilova, who headed the presidential human rights panel from 2002 to 2010, said by phone that it was “no longer a community of likeminded people but a motley crew. Allowing more people into the council makes it unclear whose voice will be taken into account and whose will not. |
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 MOSCOW — Recently appointed Defense Minister Sergei Shoigu on Friday named Colonel General Valery Gerasimov the new head of the General Staff, which wields operational control over the armed forces. |
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MOSCOW — A Vladivostok court handed down a fine of 575,125 rubles ($18,100) and 14 months of community service Tuesday to a man who shot and killed a Amur tiger in 2010.
About 50 to 60 of the rare felines, which are listed in Russia’s Red Book of endangered species, die at the hands of hunters every year, according to estimates by the World Wildlife Fund. But those responsible for the killings are rarely caught, and even more rarely successfully prosecuted.
Alexander Belyayev shot the Amur tiger on Nov. 15 while out hunting deer with friends in the Far East region of Primorye, and originally characterized the incident as one of self-defense after the beast tried to attack him, Rossiiskaya Gazeta reported. |
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 MOSCOW — Aviation professionals and consumer rights activists have reacted with bemusement to plans to ban passengers from carrying duty-free alcohol on board airplanes. |
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MOSCOW — President Vladimir Putin’s chief of staff has acknowledged that he was aware of alleged embezzlement of state funds earmarked for Russia’s satellite navigation system, a statement seen by some as a sign of an intensifying battle among the Kremlin clans. |
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MOSCOW — Archeologists working in the town of Azov in southern Russia have unearthed a fully preserved chicken egg dating to the 14th century.
“The egg is approximately dated between 1330 and 1350,” Andrei Maslovsky, a senior research fellow at the Azov Nature Reserve, told Interfax on Tuesday. |
 MOSCOW — Russia’s largest association of migrants opened an “adaptation center” in Moscow on Monday that will help workers from other countries learn Russian, obtain professional training and get medical insurance and bank loans.
The center will help to fulfill goals set by President Vladimir Putin in late August to “secure the successful integration and adaptation” of migrants in Russia, which roughly corresponds to one of the goals of the state migration policy through 2025 that he approved in June. |
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MOSCOW — Valentin Danilov, a Siberian physicist jailed on charges of espionage and treason amid a spying frenzy that swept the country in President Vladimir Putin’s first term, was granted parole Tuesday and could be freed next week. |
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MOSCOW — Gazprom contractor and billionaire Arkady Rotenberg, 60, has said that his childhood friend President Vladimir Putin was sent to Russia “from God.”
Rotenberg, a judo sparring partner of Putin’s who has investments in the construction and finance industries, is ranked as Russia’s 94th wealthiest man by Forbes with a personal fortune of $1 billion. |
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 MOSCOW — Gazprom may have agreed to cut prices for many of its European customers, but the chances of its biggest foreign market, Ukraine, getting a discount appear slim, according to an analyst report.
“Perhaps Gazprom cannot afford yet another price cut when its revenues and net profits are under such strain,” Andrew Neff, a Russia analyst for IHS Energy, said last week. |
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UTAir, Russia’s third-biggest airline, is considering raising $100 million to $350 million via a share float abroad.
Igor Petrov, the company’s financial director, said UTAir’s controlling shareholders would decide about the number of shares UTAir might float through an IPO or private placement, Vedomosti reported Monday. |
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WASHINGTON — One of the first actions of the post-election Congress is an expected vote to give U.S. exporters greater access to Russia’s newly opened markets.
The House, returning to Washington next week after some six weeks on the campaign trail, plans to take up the legislation that would extend permanent normal trade relations to Russia and another former Soviet state, Moldova. |
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MOSCOW — Alisher Usmanov, a billionaire businessman and Russia’s richest man, hired a London-based PR firm to edit a Wikipedia entry about him ahead of a stock market flotation of one of his companies, The London Times reported. |
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MOSCOW — The Transportation Ministry plans to spend 7.75 billion rubles ($248 million) on the development of regional airlines in 2013.
The ministry submitted to the government a “road map” for the development of regional air traffic, a ministry official told Vedomosti last week.
The plan allocates 2.15 billion rubles to subsidize aircraft leases and 2.9 billion rubles to local authorities for the development of regional air traffic.
The official added that the project was commissioned by Prime Minister Dmitry Medvedev, who in August spoke about poor development of regional airlines and their emphasis on providing connections with Moscow.
The Transportation Ministry predicts that the turnover of regional and local airlines will double by 2020. |
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 MOSCOW — Regional authorities might have orchestrated recent accusations by arms maker Izhmash employees against the company’s management in order to get control over the company, two people familiar with the matter said. |
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MOSCOW — Private weapons contractors will be allowed to take part in the development of nuclear weapons, a senior government official said Monday.
Deputy Prime Minister Dmitry Rogozin, who oversees the defense sector, told RIA-Novosti that while the defense industry will remain under strict state control, private contractors will be able to play a role in producing nuclear arms. |
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MOSCOW — Sberbank’s ATMs and payment terminals across the country will stop working for roughly 40 minutes Wednesday night while the bank upgrades the software used in its processing center. |
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 The dismissal of Defense Minister Anatoly Serdyukov prompted a storm of joyful shouts from a variety of places. Looking back, however, it is probably less amazing that Serdyukov was fired but that he managed to hang onto his post for almost six years. |
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I was awakened during a trip to Berlin on Wednesday by a call from my wife. “Our apartment is being searched,” she said. Only 15 minutes later, journalists began calling to ask if I planned to apply for political asylum in Germany. |
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 What can break a person? Being accused of a crime they did not commit? Betrayal by a loved one? Physical abuse? A child’s illness? Or the death of those closest to them?
Tragedy abounds in British filmmaker Rufus Norris’s film debut about a young girl’s harsh induction into the complex and fragmented world of adulthood, which saw its St. Petersburg premiere on Nov. 8. at Dom Kino movie theater. However, “Broken” is neither gratuitous nor censorial. On the contrary, it is a powerful, moving drama that probes the reasons people break down, but also explores the possibilities for healing and redemption offered by kindness and love.
“Broken” is based on the novel of the same name by Daniel Clay, which was inspired by Harper Lee’s “To Kill a Mockingbird,” and which also provides the movie with its thematic cue: The rites of passage a child faces as their secure world is shaken by a series of events in rapid succession.
The main protagonist of the drama is Skunk, an 11-year-old girl, and the only character in the film who retains some kind of innocence. |
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KAMINSKY
FASHION HOUSE KAMINSKY IS
KNOWN FOR ITS BRIGHTLY
COLORED FUR CREATIONS AND
RUSSIAN THEMES SUCH AS
TRADITIONAL PAVLOVO-POSAD
SHAWL PATTERNS. |
 MOSCOW — Finding a postcard in Moscow that captures the atmosphere and delights of living in Russia is almost impossible, even among the myriad souvenir shops that line Arbat. At best, an uninspiring shot of Red Square or Christ the Savior Cathedral will be settled for in an attempt to dispel impressions at home that Moscow is no more than a gray Soviet wasteland.
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 It is no secret that Russian chefs have a tendency to adapt foreign dishes to the local market, from spice-free Thai soups to dill-laden pizzas. This month, a French chef visiting the city explained what the term “Russian éclair” means to a French pastry chef. |
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Ñîåäèí¸ííûé: united, connected, combined
The U.S. election cycle is finally over, and I can put away my crib sheets on the Electoral College and retire my standard explanation for the chaotic, confusing and contradictory state policies for registering voters and accepting absentee ballots: Ñòðàíà íàçûâàåòñÿ Ñîåäèí¸ííûå Øòàòû Àìåðèêè. |
 Without a degree in art or design or any kind of artistic background, a former bomb technician and an ex-taxi driver are now running an avant-garde fur fashion brand, arguably Russia’s most eccentric.
The history of Kaminsky, the brand in question, is a truly original start-up story. |
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Italian cool
As temperatures drop and days grow shorter, a change is sometimes needed to offset the inevitability of nature. To brighten the mood, the city changes its look with festive decorations, some update their wardrobes, and others sign up for a haircut or dance class. |
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 UKHTA, Komi Republic — If you drive a car in Moscow, chances are the gasoline in your tank came from this city, located smack in the middle of the northern Komi republic.
Oil springs were found near the Ukhta River during the days of Ivan the Terrible in the 17th century. But the first oil well — one of the first in Russia — was only drilled by industrialist Mikhail Sidorov in the 19th century.
The drilling started in earnest a few years after the 1917 revolution, leading to the founding of the village of Chibyu along the Ukhta River in 1929. |
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 MOSCOW— Europe’s largest museum devoted to Jewish history and culture is now open in an old, elegant bus garage in the north of Moscow.
The Jewish Museum and Tolerance Center in Moscow is a multimillion dollar sprawling, state-of-the-art show created by the Federation of Jewish Communities of Russia that allows visitors to see themselves dressed up as a rabbi, watch the beginning of the world and trace the good and the bad times of Jews in Russia. |
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 WASHINGTON — The sex scandal that led to CIA Director David Petraeus’ downfall widened Tuesday with word that the top U.S. commander in Afghanistan is under investigation for thousands of alleged “inappropriate communications” with another woman involved in the case. |
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ATHENS, Greece — Greece raised 4.06 billion euros ($5.15 billion) from the sale of short-term treasury bills Tuesday, money that will help it make a crucial debt repayment at the end of the week. |
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DUBAI, United Arab Emirates — The six-nation Gulf Cooperation Council recognized the new broad-based Syrian opposition group Monday as the legitimate representatives of the Syrian people, the first formal endorsement of the opposition group that seeks to topple President Bashar Assad. |
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TOKYO — Japan’s economy contracted in the latest quarter, signaling that like Europe it may already be in recession, further weighing down world growth. |
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COLOMBO, Sri Lanka — Sri Lanka’s opposition Sunday demanded a thorough investigation into a prison shootout that killed 27 inmates.
Tissa Attanayake, a leader of United National Party, said that clashes inside prisons have become frequent in Sri Lanka and their causes must be examined. The opposition says such incidents damage the country’s reputation internationally. |
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Issues Archive