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 MOSCOW - President Vladimir Putin came down hard and heavy on the side of prosecutors Monday, dismissing private-sector pleas to negotiate the fate of Yukos CEO Mikhail Khodorkovsky while warning his own Cabinet to keep quiet about the escalating legal assault on the jailed tycoon's company. |
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About 250 St. Petersburg and Leningrad Oblast politicians and businessmen announced their intention to run in the Dec. 7 state Duma elections before last weekend's deadline. |
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MOSCOW - President Vladimir Putin's decision to side with the siloviki in their assault on core Yukos shareholders could destroy the system of checks and balances he has constructed within his administration, making him increasingly dependent on the will and resources of one Kremlin faction. |
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MOSCOW - In one of the most dramatic financial meltdowns since the 1998 crisis, stocks, bonds and the ruble all plummeted Monday as investors ran for cover in the wake of the weekend arrest of Yukos CEO Mikhail Khodorkovsky on charges of massive fraud and tax evasion. |
All photos from issue.
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Newspapers from across the spectrum on Monday sharply criticized Saturday's arrest of Mikhail Khodorkovsky, with pro-business to pro-government publications splashing dire warnings of its consequences across their front pages. "Capitalism with Stalin's Face," shouted a headline in Nezavisimaya Gazeta. |
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MOSCOW - Faced with calls to intervene in the case of Yukos chief Mikhail Khodorkovsky, President Vladimir Putin told a Cabinet meeting Monday that it was up to the courts to decide guilt or innocence. |
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Russia ranked an unimpressive 18 steps from the bottom of Reporters Without Borders' annual listing of how free the press is around the world, as the 148th of 166 countries studied. The study indicates that Russian journalists are less free to report the news than their counterparts in Nigeria (103), Azerbaijan (113) and Ukraine (132), which are not known for the liberty they grant to the fourth estate. Of former Soviet countries, only Belarus (151), Uzbekistan (154) and Turkmenistan (158) rank lower. In relative terms, Russia's ranking has changed little from last year, when it was 121st on a list of 139 countries. Reporters Without Borders cited difficulty getting information about the war in Chechnya and numerous murders of Russian journalists as reasons for the country's low placement. |
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 MOSCOW - Twenty-six inmates took to the stage Friday for the Kalina Krasnaya singing concert - and the six winners walked free. Security was naturally high at the concert hall in the Olympic Village in the south of Moscow on Friday night as the Justice Ministry took steps to ensure that none of the prisoners escaped. |
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MOSCOW - As bitterly cold winds blew across the country over the weekend, dozens of schools and residential buildings in several regions were left without heat, scores of schools were closed, and at least one city put up municipal property as collateral for a loan to obtain fuel. |
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ASTANA, Kazakhstan - In an unprecedented security measure, doctors from the United States and Spain will be present at the landing site of the Soyuz spacecraft due to bring US astronaut Edward Lu, Russia's Yuri Malenchenko and Spain's Pedro Duque back to Earth, Russian space officials said. |
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Bombs Found on Train ST. PETERSBURG (SPT) - Two aerial bombs were found among the cargo of a train that arrived in St. Petersburg loaded with scrap metal, Interfax said Friday. According to the press service of the city Emergency Situations Ministry, the two bombs, each weighing 250 kilograms, were found on Tuesday when the train from Yaroslavl was being unloaded. |
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So it's back to square one for politicians and businessmen: Who is Mr. Putin after all? About four years after President Vladimir Putin shot into the highest ranks of power with his appointment as prime minister in August 1999, the question is being raised once again. |
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Citibank To Go Retail MOSCOW (SPT) - Russian Citibank, a subsidiary of Citigroup, plans to launch retail banking services in St. Petersburg next year, Interfax reported Monday. |
 Competition on the cellular services market in St. Petersburg is getting hot. During the past six months the St. Petersburg market gained two new cellular operators, Vimpelcom with its BeeLine GSM, and St. Petersburg Telecom with its Tele2 GSM brand. Previously the market had been shared by just two GSM-standard providers, MegaFon and MTS. Analysts immediately began to predict rapid depletion of the market, while the operators themselves demonstrated their flexibility yet again. |
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 A residential mortgage, or ipoteka in Russian, describes the taking of a loan to buy a dwelling under which the commitment to repay the loan is secured by the lender's right to sell the property. |
 Computer programmer Vladislav Chetyrkin, 28, had heard a lot about mortgages over the years, but had never bitten the bullet and tried to get one. He, his wife and their six-year-old son had put up with the vagaries of renting an apartment and watched the prices of apartments for sale soar out of their reach. Getting a mortgage seemed to involve a lot of expense and red tape and he wasn't sure he wanted to go through all that. |
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 In the spring of 1998, Scott Antel was offered a transfer to the Budapest office of the now defunct Andersen international law firm. Then working at the Moscow office as a tax and legal expert, Antel initially planned to transfer in March of the following year. |
 DEARBORN, Michigan - Rouge Steel, whose sprawling works became a symbol of raw 20th-century American capitalism, may soon rest in the hands of even rawer owners: Russian investors. Severstal, Russia's No. 2 steelmaker, has agreed to buy most of Rouge, which has filed for bankruptcy protection, for an undisclosed price. |
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The vigorous reform program of President Vladimir Putin's government has been experiencing an extended interlude. The prevailing - and very wishful - conventional wisdom holds that once the election season is over, Putin will rediscover his inner reformist self, and continue the reform process that marked the first two years of his presidency. |
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In his address to the New York Stock Exchange on Sept. 26 Russian President Vladimir Putin struck a cautious, but forward-looking note in describing the current state of the Russian economy. |
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The world stands to gain significantly from Russia's accession to the World Trade Organisation. Further delay would be bad news for Russia and the global economy. Of course, the WTO and its members must secure sound terms for accession. But there are good reasons for moving to have Russia in the WTO sooner rather than later. |
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President Vladimir Putin broke his silence on Monday and was taking no prisoners. He offered a pretty unambiguous endorsement of the prosecutors' actions against Yukos CEO Mikhail Khodorkovsky, rebuffing calls from an anxious business elite to convene a meeting and letting his government know that he would brook no dissent on the issue. |
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On Saturday morning, the wires announced that the Prosecutor General's Office had detained Yukos CEO Mikhail Khodorkovsky. As a result, my wife, a radio journalist, had to scurry off to work at the double. And the quiet family weekend, which we had been looking forward to all week long, was completely ruined. |
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Thieves Like Us When asked why he robbed banks, the outlaw Willie Sutton put it to them straight: "That's where the money is." It is, of course, physically - not to mention politically - impossible for the corrupt cadres of the Bush Regime to give a straight answer to anything, but if they could be forced to cough up the truth behind the conquest of Iraq, their reply would be identical to Sutton's. |
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Diana's Butler Tells All LONDON (Reuters) - The former butler to Britain's late Princess Diana vowed Sunday to defy pleas from her royal sons and continue his headline-grabbing series of revelations about her private life. Diana's sons, Princes William and Harry, accused Burrell of a "cold and overt betrayal" of their mother. |
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FC Zenit St. Petersburg held last year's champions Lokomotiv Moscow to a scoreless draw to clinch the silver medal in the Russian Premiere League on Saturday. |
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Three and a half months after billionaire Roman Abramovich bought Chelsea, another Russian tycoon is planning to buy into London rival Arsenal, a British newspaper reported Sunday. The Independent on Sunday said Vladimir Potanin, the oil and mining magnate who controls Norilsk Nickel, is considering putting up to 120 million pounds ($203 million) into a new stadium for Arsenal in return for a share of the club. |
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