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MOSCOW - Former Yugoslav President Slobodan Milosevic during his years in power funneled from $3 billion to $4 billion out of his country with the help of the Yugoslav Embassy in Mos cow, a Serbian-language weekly magazine has reported. Quoting unnamed banking sources, the magazine Reporter alleges Milosevic was sending cash through diplomatic mail to Belgrade's embassy in Moscow. The Reporter wrote that in Moscow the money was handled personally by former Yugoslav Ambassador Danilo Mar kovic and later by his successor Bo ri slav Milosevic, who is Slobodan Milo sevic's brother. Yugoslavia was under a UN economic embargo at that time and its banks were not allowed to operate abroad. |
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 He is called iOne. He has nothing but an online PC computer and a practically empty Moscow flat, which he is not allowed to leave for three weeks. And he has been challenged to find out what the Russian Internet has to offer and if he can survive using that and that alone. |
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Prosecutors who summoned the finance minister to St. Petersburg for interrogation Monday also hauled in Yabloko Duma Deputy Igor Artemyev to testify in the same case. Finance Minister Alexei Kudrin has not commented on the decision by St. Petersburg prosecutors to investigate his days as deputy mayor here. |
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Authorities carried out the second violent raid on a major local bank within a week, invading Baltiisky Bank with OMON troops and intimidating employees before seizing documents. |
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LONDON - She was more successful than her husband. She enjoyed a string of lovers. And she loved to shop. Catherine the Great, Russia's greatest empress, has a decidedly modern appeal more than 200 years after her death. Perhaps that's why interest is so strong in a new exhibition of some of Catherine's most prized treasures opening in London this week. |
All photos from issue.
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 MOSCOW - The Supreme Court's panel of military judges on Tuesday dismissed a lower court's verdict against military journalist and environmentalist Gri gory Pasko, sending the espionage and treason case against him back for new court hearings. "I consider this [decision] . |
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MOSCOW - U.S. spy suspect Edmond Pope celebrated Thanksgiving on Thursday with a traditional turkey meal in his cell ahead of a crucial few days preparing for a probable verdict next week, his lawyer said. |
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MOSCOW - Chechen leader Aslan Maskhadov called in an interview published Tuesday for direct talks with the Kremlin on ending the war, and proposed that such talks be mediated by former president Boris Yeltsin. "Yeltsin should show the young leader [Vladimir Putin] that if he, Yelt sin - a powerful politician, wise from experience - was lied to by his generals, then they can lie to Putin," Mask hadov told the Moskovskiye Novosti newspaper. Maskhadov accused military leaders of lying to Putin about their ability to win the war, saying police and ordinary soldiers were suffering higher casualty rates than front-line troops. "It's difficult for the generals to admit this because they have banked everything on this war - their ratings, authority and future postings," Mask ha dov said. |
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 MOSCOW - Russia's new State Council set Josef Stalin's choice as anthem of the Soviet Union against capitalist Russia's current theme on Wednesday in the next round of the country's decade-long battle for a popular anthem. |
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WARSAW - Russian Foreign Minister Igor Ivanov on Thursday shrugged off a U.S. threat to impose new sanctions on Moscow over arms sales to Iran and said it alone would choose its own trade partners. Ivanov, addressing a news conference alongside his Polish opposite number, Wladyslaw Bartoszewski, made no reference to the recent Russian decision to pull out of a 1995 deal with Washington on curtailing arms sales to Tehran. |
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Russia, Poland Talk WARSAW (Reuters) - Russia and Poland took the first steps on Thursday towards ending a decade of mutual mistrust and flagging economic relations since the collapse of the Soviet bloc. |
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VLADIVOSTOK, Far East - President Vladimir Putin calls it "a crying shame." UES head Anatoly Chubais blames Primorye Gov. Yevgeny Naz dratenko. The governor, in turn, sees a conspiracy between the cabinet, the media and the IMF. Finger-pointing in the State Duma on Wednesday notwithstanding, the energy crisis in Primorye remained unresolved. As Chubais, Nazdratenko and others were grilled at parliamentary hearings, tens of thousands in the Far East continued to shiver without heat at home or at work. "The problem is beyond our control," Chubais said in an address to the Duma. "We can deliver heat, but we cannot channel it through the destroyed municipal infrastructure. |
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 Queen Silvia of Sweden and her daughter, Princess Victoria, paid a one day royal visit to St. Petersburg this week that involved excursions to orphanages and a juvenile prison. |
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MOSCOW - Palestinian President Yasser Arafat, urgently seeking support from Moscow and signaling a desire to restart stalled peace talks, will meet President Vladimir Putin on Friday to discuss violence in the Middle East. Arafat and Israel have repeatedly urged Russia - nominally co-sponsor of the peace process with the United States - to get more involved in efforts to halt two months of violence in which at least 260 people have died, mostly Palestinians. |
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MOSCOW - In a newspaper interview published Tuesday, a top Russian admiral reiterated the claim that the Kursk nuclear submarine was likely sunken by a Western submarine and said that the foreign vessel emitted SOS signals shortly after the disaster. |
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MOSCOW - The Caspian Pipeline Consortium of international oil giants said Wednesday it had welded the last joint in an $2.5-billion oil pipeline connecting petroleum fields in western Kazakstan to a marine terminal in the Russian Black Sea port of Novorossiisk - giving a boost to Russia's ambition to control a main route to world markets. |
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MOSCOW - The management of Gaz prom is taking initial steps to fulfill a promise made on Oct. 27 by its board to liberalize the market in the natural gas monopoly's shares. |
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St. Petersburg's Sberbank has filed a lawsuit against the Ice Palace, seeking payment for part of a $20 million loan that it gave the company that runs the stadium. The case, filed Oct. 5 in the St. Petersburg and Leningrad Oblast Arbitration court, would seem a straightforward enough case of alleged loan default. But the suit has opened a financial Pandora's box of creditors, debtors and a Finnish construction company whose management seems to have evaporated. The bank is calling in the loan, and it is not even clear how much was budgeted to build the stadium. As such, Sberbank - one of four banks that agreed to help finance the project - may have a long wait in recouping its loan. |
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 The city's hotels have cracked the top 10 in a survey of the world's most expensive rooms while Moscow has dropped from fourth to 17th place in the last year. |
 MOSCOW - Despite recent accolades from foreign investors and international financial organizations, the state of Russian tax reform received a shrill wake-up call Wednesday from its harshest critics - finance and tax officials themselves. "Is there any overarching concept of tax policy in the government? Unfortunately, no," said Andrei Makarov, former State Duma deputy and now head of the Duma's expert group on taxes. |
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Investors could be trading Svyazinvest's consolidated mega-operators on the U.S. stock exchange by 2003, according to a timetable, which was laid out by company representative Sergei Chernogorodsky at a securities market conference held in St. |
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MOSCOW - With state coffers overflowing with petrodollars but thousands freezing without heating in the Far East, the Cabinet on Thursday gave preliminary approval to a long-term energy strategy. A government plan for the period up to 2020 urges maximum efficiency in the use of natural resources in a country where oil and gas is plentiful but where energy is often wasted due to the economy's deep structural problems. |
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Oil Boom Covering Up Bigger Woes RUSSIA and the IMF have come to the delightful conclusion that they don't really need each other. After all, why should Russia borrow Western money at interest, when it can earn it hand over fist thanks to oil at $30 a barrel? With prices like that, Russia can even pay its Soviet-era debts (although much Soviet-era debt can be repudiated with only good consequences for Russia). |
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Raid on Bank Is Sign of City's Newer Status WHAT I would normally regard as a pleasant fact - the growing role of St. Petersburg banks in the national economy - was confirmed last week in a more unpleasant way when investigators from the police, backed up by dozens of armed OMON paramilitaries, paid a visit to the headquarters of the region's largest bank, Promyshlenno-Stroitelny, and confiscated various documents. |
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WHILE Americans were busy counting and recounting votes in Florida and the whole world seemed to be in pause mode waiting for the outcome of the U.S. presidential election, President Vladimir Putin dropped a proverbial bombshell, which - as ill luck would have it - is likely to receive far too little notice given the post-election chaos. |
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A series of long-forgotten high-profile criminal probes resurfaced this week, with prosecutors ensnaring a minister, the city's senior judge, a lawmaker and a lawyer in their net. |
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Dear Editor, Your article on the subject of using plutonium fuel in fast neutron reactors ["IAEA Gives Backing to New Russian Spent-Fuel Reactors," No. 14] reported the opinions of "experts" representing environmental groups. If the reports are correct then these experts are not experts, but are commenting on the basis of prejudice and ignorance. |
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Walking in (late, of course) to meet a friend for dinner at the Harbin restaurant, I must admit that my hopes for a good meal were mixed with worries about what that ultimately might mean. I love Chinese food and, having already been to and reviewed another St. |
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On its fourth birthday last Saturday, Jungle was packed full of the very people that have these days ceased to be its regulars, having long since left it for smarter establishments on the other side of the Neva. |
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To live up to its status of Russia's cultural capital, St. Petersburg is currently promoting art projects from all over the country by unveiling new contemporary art. And if you somehow missed three exhibitions of modern art put together by the Marat Gelman Gallery in Mos cow and now hosted by the Marble Palace of the State Russian Museum, now's your chance. |
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Over the last week, St. Petersburg's Philharmonic has given up its stage to three very prominent conductors: Vasily Sinaisky, Rudolf Barshai and Alexander Lazerev. |
 The first time pop sensation Filipp Kirkorov appeared at the Eurovision Song Contest in 1995, it took some of those who were seeing him for the first time a few minutes to work out which side of the gender barrier this shaggy-haired, baby-faced apparition actually was on. |
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Two much-hyped shows by the band promoted as the Glenn Miller Orchestra at Mos cow's Kremlin Palace resulted in a scandal this week, as Moscow journalists discovered that it was not the "official" Miller tribute band from the U. |
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No Nuclear Sales BEIJING (AP) - China has made its strongest commitment to date not to sell nuclear missile technology abroad, winning an immediate promise from Washington to forgo possibly bruising sanctions and to boost commercial space cooperation. |
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ZAGREB, Croatia - The killing of Serb policemen, a bomb in Kosovo and warnings that Slobodan Milosevic may stage a comeback sent a sharp reminder to European Union leaders on Wednesday that the Balkans are still far from stable. |
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