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HELSINKI - President Vladimir Putin lashed out Monday at plans to expand NATO eastwards and said only a "sick mind" could believe Moscow poses an aggressive threat to European security. "I underline that we don't see any objective reason for the Baltic states to become members of NATO,'' Putin, on his first state visit to Finland, told a news conference with Finnish counterpart Tarja Halonen. |
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About 20 percent of St. Petersburg residents perceive Estonia and Lithuania as Russia's "enemies," according to a poll by the locally based Institute of Sociology of the Russian Academy of Sciences and the Center for Sociological and Scientific Research. |
 On Sept. 10, the presidential administration will announce the results of a tender to carry out the restoration of the Konstantinovsky Palace in Strelna, according to Vladimir Kozhin, head of presidential administration. Five companies have submitted bids in the tender, including the local firms 16th Trust, Vozrozhdeniye and Len stroi rekonstruktsiya. |
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MOSCOW - Akhmad Kadyrov, the head of the Chechen administration, accused federal troops of not making his job any easier last week, saying that he personally knows the difficulties of trying to restore peaceful life to Chechnya. |
All photos from issue.
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 City Hall has once again introduced paid municipal parking lots to the city, in apparent defiance of a Russian Supreme Court decision last fall banning paid parking in cities that had introduced a sales tax. Earlier this month, Governor Vla di mir Yakovlev approved the creation of four downtown, paid parking zones. |
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MOSCOW - As downtown Moscow turned into a giant pedestrian party zone over the weekend, President Vladimir Putin congratulated Muscovites on the "double holiday" of the capital city's 854th birthday and the traditionally festive beginning of the school year. |
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MOSCOW - Tatyana Leshchinskaya and her husband Ernest assumed they would get their visas last November when they went to the U.S. Embassy for an interview. Leshchinskaya was one of thousands of applicants worldwide who had won the "green-card lottery," or the diversity immigrant visa program that gives citizens of designated countries and their immediate family members under 21 the chance for permanent U. |
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MOSCOW - Russian survivors of World War II Nazi concentration camps on Friday received their first compensation payments from a fund created by German government and industry, as leaders hailed the closure of a black period between the two countries. |
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MOSCOW - An NTV-style takeover has occurred at TVK, the oldest privately owned television station in Lipetsk, and a regular critic of the region's governor. Security police last Wednesday locked out the 100 staff members and helped to install a new general director, Dmitry Kolbasko. "We always offered our audience a point of view different from that of our governor's office," ousted TVK news editor Ilya Sakharov said Thursday by telephone. "Thus, local official agencies, like the Tax Police or fire departments, have been very persistent in their attempts to close us down in the past two years." Lipetsk regional administration spokesperson Alexander Sarik did not conceal his satisfaction. |
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 ASHULUK, Astrakhan Region - An increasingly aggressive NATO is demanding that Russia place its nuclear arsenal under international supervision. Poland is insisting that its border with Belarus be redrawn. |
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Nikitin Honored WASHINGTON (Reuters) - The United States has awarded environmental activist Alexander Nikitin a five-month research fellowship in Washington, the State Department said Friday. Nikitin, the former navy officer who exposed environmental problems connected with Russia's Northern Fleet, will do research on nongovernmental organizations and their relations with authorities, it said in a statement. |
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 MOSCOW - The State Duma's top budget official accused the government of underestimating next year's budget surplus in order to spend up to $6 billion without any parliamentary oversight. Alexander Zhukov, chairman of the Duma's budget and tax committee, vowed on Friday to fight what he called intentional deception on the part of Prime Minister Mikhail Kasyanov's government, which submitted its 2002 draft budget Aug. |
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MOSCOW - Just months before the federal government's much-hyped "Electronic Russia" program swings into action, its main initiators, the Communications Ministry and the Economic Development and Trade Ministry, still haven't decided who's in charge. |
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MOSCOW - Russia warned its computer experts Friday of the dangers of visiting the United States after a Russian software designer was arrested there for violating a controversial new law. In July, Dmitry Sklyarov became the first person to be arrested on charges of selling technology designed to circumvent a 1998 U.S. copyright-protection law. Formally arraigned on Thursday, he faces up to 25 years in jail if convicted. "We want to point out to all Russian specialists cooperating with U.S. firms in computer programming and software design that whatever the outcome of Sklyarov's case they may fall under the jurisdiction of the 1998 act on the territory of the United States," the Foreign Ministry said in a statement. |
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 MOSCOW - Alexei Miller added to the numbers of hometown products grabbing top spots in Moscow on his 100th day as CEO of Gazprom, sacking the right-hand man of his predecessor and installing a fellow St. |
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MOSCOW - Mosenergo chief Alexander Remezov checked into the hospital with a heart condition ahead of a hotly contested shareholders meeting Friday, temporarily trumping efforts by parent company Unified Energy Systems (UES) to sack him. UES, owner of 51 percent of the Moscow power monopoly, had vowed to sack Remezov, but after his sudden illness opted instead to use its majority on the Mosenergo board to "send him on vacation" indefinitely and postponed counting Friday's vote by shareholders. |
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State To Buy Euros MOSCOW (Reuters) - The Central Bank will convert a small part of its foreign-currency reserves into euros following Europe's transition to its new currency, bank chairperson Viktor Gerashchenko said Monday. |
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ON Friday, an extraordinary shareholders meeting was or was not held at Moscow's power monopoly, Mosenergo. The reason was that its parent company, Unified Energy Systems, wants to sack Mosenergo's General Director Alexander Remezov. Since UES holds a controlling stake in Mosenergo, it is well within its rights to do so. |
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ON Aug. 10, the new federal law "On the State Registration of Legal Entities" was officially published, and the law is to enter into effect on July 1, 2002, providing a waiting period intended to allow the Russian government to bring all relevant normative acts into accordance with the new law. |
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THERE are three great economic powers in today's world: the United States, Europe and Japan. In principle, each of these has two potent recession-fighting tools at its disposal. One is monetary policy: The Central Bank can print money and drive down interest rates. |
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WASHINGTON - The U.S. capital has hosted some monster protests over the decades. But to hear Washington's city fathers tell it, all will pale in comparison to the day the IMF/World Bank protesters came back. |
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AS international delegates are gathered for the United Nations-sponsored conference on racism in South Africa, it is worth asking what place racism has in Russian society. Russians do not see themselves as racist and intolerant. On the contrary, they tend to have a vaguely inclusive notion of their own ethnic identity. |
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PRESIDENT Vladimir Putin's two-day state visit to Finland is a welcome development, one in which the Russian side managed to get all its signals right. |
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EVERYONE knows that the Federal Security Service, or FSB, is an extremely secretive organization. That's their business, after all, and I'm not going to argue with that. But sometimes the level of secrecy makes me suspect that those who labor behind the massive FSB walls on Lubyanka Ploshchad in Moscow or on Liteiny Prospect here in St. |
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Barrels of Fun The Republican Party dodged a bullet this week, when a Solomonic compromise averted a deep philosophical crisis at the heart of the party's arch-conservative core. |
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Refugees Transferred CHRISTMAS ISLAND, Australia (Reuters) - An Australian naval ship with hospital facilities pulled up alongside a Norwegian freighter on Monday ready to transfer hundreds of unwanted asylum seekers for the next leg of their journey. The HMAS Manoora was given the all clear to transfer the 433 mostly Afghans after an Australian court lifted an injunction on moving the boat people out of Australian territorial waters around remote Christmas Island in the Indian Ocean. The boat people will now sail to Papua New Guinea, Australia's nearest northern neighbor, where they will be transferred to aircraft and flown to New Zealand and the tiny South Pacific island of Nauru to have their refugee claims assessed. |
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 As you cross a gray courtyard just off Ulitsa Marata, a fin-de-siècle apartment building becomes visible. In typical Petersburg fashion, it is easy to work out which three buttons on the lock are the ones you need to press to get in. |
 Aug. 26 marked the 131st anniversary of the birth of Alexander Kuprin, one of Russia's most lyrical writers noted for his evocative sketches and shimmering short stories. By a twist of fate, Aug. 25 marked the 63rd anniversary of his death here in St. Petersburg in 1938, just one year after he returned to the Soviet Union after living as an émigré in France. |
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Issues Archive