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Anyone thinking of visiting Russia with a new fast-track visa next week should think again. The much-trumpeted introduction of the three-day tourist visas on Friday will be delayed as multiple government agencies, tour operators and airlines scramble to get their act together. |
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MOSCOW - Former President Boris Yeltsin will get one less birthday greeting Friday when he turns 71. The folks in Yeltsin's birthplace of Butka in the Urals will for the first time in decades not send a congratulatory telegram. |
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MOSCOW - With sports emerging as a new Kremlin priority, President Vladimir Putin has ordered the government to examine the feasibility of creating a national sports television channel. The order, announced by Deputy Prime Minister Valentina Matviyenko on Tuesday, is raising questions about whether TV6's airwaves might be taken over by a Kremlin-backed owner ready to promote a healthy lifestyle instead of the team of journalists who saw the plug pulled on their channel under a court order last week. |
All photos from issue.
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MOSCOW - Prime Minister Mikhail Kasyanov has signed off on a three-year plan to tackle the country's growing drug problem. But critics fear the new program, to be overseen by the Interior Ministry, will perpetuate repressive measures against addicts without duly promoting prevention and treatment programs. |
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Russia offered a muted response to U.S. President George W. Bush's declaration that Iraq, North Korea and Iran are an "axis of evil," with Foreign Minister Igor Ivanov on Thursday renewing Moscow's call for Iraq to readmit UN inspectors. |
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Boris Berezovsky acknowledged in an interview Thursday that he gave $2 million to Chechen rebel leader Shamil Basayev, but reiterated that both men were government officials at the time and the money was earmarked for reconstruction work. "If this is what I'm being accused of, I'll be happy to answer any questions," Berezovsky told the Gazeta newspaper. |
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MOSCOW - Two weeks after President Vladimir Putin ordered his cabinet to tackle the problem of homeless and runaway children, government officials have slapped together a plan to get kids off the street with the help of a 24-hour hotline, new shelters and task forces at four separate ministries. |
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 MOSCOW - An $0.86 deal between NATO allies could net Russia $20 million. Poland on Tuesday agreed to buy 23 Soviet-built MiG-29 fighters from Germany - for one euro ($0.86). The price is a symbolic gesture by Germany, which inherited the MiGs after its reunification with East Germany, Polish defense ministry spokesperson Artur Weber said in a telephone interview from Warsaw. |
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The entire team at the St. Petersburg office of Gallup Media, the highest-profile public-opinion and market-research company in Russia, announced on Wednesday that they had left the organization to team up with the St. |
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MOSCOW - German giant Deutsche Bank on Wednesday granted Vneshekonombank a one-year, $100-million loan - the largest to a Russian bank since the 1998 crisis. But while the loan to Vneshekonombank, or VEB, is good for the sector as a whole, it highlights one of the chronic problems in the industry - the unfair advantage state-owned banks have over private banks, analysts said. |
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The local Ladoga holding company and Alfa-Eko, the firm which owns the trademark for Smirnov vodka, announced Wednesday that they were going to use two production lines at the Ladoga Distillery in St. |
 MOSCOW - The country's largest supermarket chain, Pyatyorochka, announced Wednesday that it will double its 84 stores and more than triple sales over the next two years with the assistance of its new shareholder, the EBRD. The discount chain, founded by two wholesale companies in St. |
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Troika Dialog, a Russian brokerage and investment company, is planning to open an office in St. Petersburg in a month's time, the company's press service said in a telephone interview on Thursday. |
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10% of LUKoil Bought MOSCOW (SPT) - Market watchers suspect that international portfolio investor Capital Group has accumulated more than 10-percent of LUKoil, Vedemosti reported Thursday. Martial Chaillet, a Geneva-based asset manager with Capital Group, declined to confirm or deny the reports. "LUKoil is a good company with good prospects," Chaillet said. |
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AMID the frenzy of hand-wringing that accompanied the regrettable closure of TV6 last week, one small piece of news was overlooked by the vast majority of those who report on events in this country. Alongside sometimes hysterical reporting that cast the closure of TV6 as the end of democracy as we know it, the fact that journalists at NTV had signed a charter guaranteeing their independence hardly registered on any news agenda at all. |
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WHAT, when you get right down to it, is the point of the new three-day-visas-at-the-border scheme that the Foreign Ministry and the Economic Development and Trade Ministry are so comically trying to implement? Is it to increase revenues from business and tourist travel to Moscow, St. |
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THE Federal Security Service has alleged that Boris Berezovsky financed the Chechen rebels. Boris Abramovich, in turn, claims that he has evidence of the FSB's involvement in organizing the apartment block bombings in Moscow. Just imagine if the political opposition in the United States were to accuse the FBI of complicity in the events of Sept. |
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THE children were in a state of excitement. The teachers at their kindergarten had just told them that the next day a priest would pay them a visit and they would get to kiss the cross. |
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WITH all the hullaballoo surrounding the closure of TV6, the Jan. 15 deadline for determining details of the sale of Gazprom-Media's stake in NTV passed relatively unnoticed. Gazprom CEO Alexei Miller said on Jan. 17 that the deadline was being postponed - but only by two weeks. That's Thursday. One of the paradoxes in this whole affair has been that TV6, owned by the hostile Boris Berezovsky, in its last six months was notably less hard-hitting in its news coverage than NTV in its Gazprom-Media-controlled incarnation. |
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 Although the urban beach in front of the Peter and Paul Fortress is best known as the city's premier location for sand and sun, this week it is home to something completely different, the International Ice-Sculpting Festival. Sixteen teams made up of 48 artists from countries like Sweden, Switzerland, Poland and France, as well as from cities across Russia, will be competing for top honors at this year's festival, which is being held in St. |
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 Last Friday, a new light appeared on the city's club scene with the opening of the blues club Gandharva. Created by Sergei Nekrasov, who first ran Art Club and later Club O. |
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The next week holds a couple of great treats for local jazz lovers, with two major concerts taking place. First, Gary Burton, the world's premier jazz vibraphonist, will play a concert with pianist Makoto Ozone at the Shostakovich Philarmonic on Feb. |
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There are myriad reasons to visit Helsinki - business, pleasure, shopping or the infernal visa-renewal trip. Personally, I have long thought that one of the perks of living in St. |
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VORONEZH, Central Russia - What is a Russian soccer team to do when it thinks its name sounds like an English expletive? Change it, of course. That's what happened with first division soccer side Fakel Voronezh, whose name - pronounced very loosely like "F-k all" in English - has brought embarrassment to the team on their rare trips abroad. |
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More Tyson Charges LOS ANGELES (Reuters) - Las Vegas police said Wednesday that they will ask prosecutors later this week to charge boxer Mike Tyson with sexual assault and were investigating allegations by a second woman that the former heavyweight champion raped her at his Las Vegas home. |
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Issues Archive