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MOSCOW - Shortly after a Moscow court rejected an appeal to release jailed Yukos founder Mikhail Khodorkovsky and place him under house arrest, Yukos announced a bid to take full control of Sibneft. "Sibneft is our subsidiary. ... This means we are entitled to the company's profits and should have our people on the company's board," Yukos spokesman Alexander Shadrin said in a telephone interview. |
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The children of those repressed by Stalin's regime should apply for compensation, a representative of the Leningrad Military District Prosecutor's Office said Thursday. |
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MOSCOW - A young conscript from Lyubertsy has died and 50 others are in hospital after being forced to stand outside in the piercing cold while their plane was being refueled en route to Magadan - their first deployment. President Vladimir Putin on Thursday ordered a thorough investigation into the outbreak of pneumonia and severe respiratory illness among the recently drafted border guards, who were among a group of 118 conscripts flying to the far eastern region from the Chkalovsky air base outside Moscow. |
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MOSCOW - Rodina co-leader Dmitry Rogozin denied a split in his nationalist bloc Thursday but conceded he had differences with co-leader Sergei Glazyev. |
All photos from issue.
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MOSCOW - The man who made Rolandas Paksas president of Lithuania a year ago could now bring down the embattled head of state in a political scandal that has rocked the Baltic nation. Yury Borisov, a former Soviet air force officer and businessman with ties to the Russian arms industry, is the eminence grise in the Paksas presidency. |
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Liberal parties Yabloko and the Union of Right Forces, or SPS, have agreed to run as a unified bloc in Legislative Assembly elections in district No. 4 and district No. |
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President Vladimir Putin has appointed Valery Nazarov, vice governor of St. Petersburg and head of the city property committee, to manage the Kremlin administration's control department. Nazarov will oversee the implementation of presidential decrees in a position that Putin once held himself. |
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Danish Re-Burial ST. PETERSBURG (SPT) - The re-burial in St. Petersburg of Maria Fyodorovna, mother of Nicholas II, the last tsar, will take place on Sept. |
 MOSCOW - Presidential hopeful Irina Khakamada distinctly sharpened her rhetoric against President Vladimir Putin on Wednesday, arguing in a full-page open letter in Kommersant and at a briefing with reporters that Putin has built "a society based on lies" - first and foremost hiding the truth about what happened at Dubrovka in October 2002. Khakamada wrote that after she negotiated with five of the Chechen rebels who took some 800 people hostage at the theater, she came to the conclusion that they "did not plan on blowing up the theater, and the authorities were not interested in saving all the hostages. |
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 MOSCOW - Former intelligence officer Mikhail Trepashkin said he had evidence supporting a hair-raising theory that the Federal Security Service participated in the deadly 1999 apartment house bombings. |
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MOSCOW - Russia has reneged on a promise to Germany to return archive material that landed in Soviet hands during World War II, Der Spiegel reported, citing a leaked communication sent by the Russian Foreign Ministry to its German counterpart. Russia has decided to declare the Rathenau Archives to be "compensatory restitution" for damages inflicted by German forces in World War II, the German weekly said. |
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 Gone are the days when men piled out of their cars after a fender-bender to argue over who caused the accident and what the damages were worth. With the nationwide introduction of mandatory third-party car insurance on Jan. 1, a time-tested Russian ritual may have fallen by the wayside. |
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MOSCOW - Prime Minister Mikhail Kasyanov tentatively approved a controversial health insurance project at this year's first Cabinet meeting Thursday. Although there is general consensus that the healthcare system is in dire need of an overhaul, the legislation drafted by the Economic Development and Trade Ministry has faced strong opposition from insurers and the Finance Ministry, which both have raised concerns over its fiscal viability. |
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Petmol Upgrade ST. PETERSBURG (SPT) - St. Petersburg's Petmol dairy plans to purchase Tetra Pak equipment worth $15.5 million, Interfax reported Thursday. Petmol deputy director Sergei Polyakov said the equipment will be acquired under terms of leasing for a period of five years. |
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MOSCOW - Law enforcement agencies must "rigorously observe the rights of economic entities and citizens" while fighting economic crime, President Vladimir Putin said Thursday. |
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MOSCOW - It was raining, and the roads were slick. A sedan made an illegal left turn and rammed the front end of another car. It seems like a typical accident that could have happened anywhere in Russia. Injured passengers are treated by a Russian doctor, the paperwork of the case is handled by a Russian lawyer. |
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For the first time in 10 years Swedish auto maker Volvo broke off a contract with a local dealer, St. Petersburg's Sigma Motors. The company sold about 200 Volvos last year, but lost official partner status when it failed to open its own service center. |
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MOSCOW - Despite a series of accidents that culminated in the first crash of a Tu-160 strategic bomber, the air force had a good 2003, and after a long break received a batch of modernized jets, its commander said Wednesday. At the end of the year, the air force received five upgraded Su-27SM Flanker fighters fitted with new avionics as part of an ongoing modernization plan and will have 20 more Su-27 jets upgraded to that standard in 2004, air force commander Vladimir Mikhailov told reporters at an annual briefing. |
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MOSCOW - Gazprom has paid Yakov Goldovsky, the ex-president of its petrochemicals holding Sibur, $90 million in exchange for disputed stakes in the latter's subsidiaries, Vedomosti reported Wednesday. |
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MOSCOW - Once again the state is challenging a vodka trademark registration, only this time it has nothing to do with its long-standing foe, vodka magnate Yury Shefler. Soyuzplodoimport, the state company created to manage Stolichnaya, Moskovskaya and other famous vodka brands it wrested from Shefler's SPI Group in 2002, has filed a complaint against the registration of the trademark Cristall, Kommersant reported Tuesday, citing a source in the state trademark and patent agency Rospatent. |
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Prominent liberal politician Irina Khakamada has announced that she will enter the presidential race. The election will be held in mid-March, and Khakamada's last-minute self-nomination was unexpected, even by her own party, the Union of Right Forces. |
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Ever since Georgians came together to elect 36-year-old Mikheil Saakashvili as their next president the country has been gripped by a sense of hope. Georgians talk about how the new government will now go after corrupt officials and businessmen and get the economy back on its feet, and how ordinary people will now work honestly for the good of the country. |
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My current mood might merely be the result of winter in St. Petersburg; everything looks gray, the sun barely shines, it is freezing cold and you need to turn on the lights in the kitchen so that you can see at 10 a.m. Each new day hardly awakens your desire to wake up again. Or my mood may be in response to a photograph printed in one of the latest issues of Der Spiegel magazine that apparently shows a woman wearing a military uniform shooting a handcuffed man lying on the sidewalk in front of the main entrance to the Dubrovka theater early on the morning Oct. |
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 Britpop might be long gone, but its spirit will be revisited as the underground club Moloko is hosting a Britpop event this week. Organized and headlined by the veteran English-language band Wine, it will feature a more recent crop of local British pop music lovers. The event is called - in Wine's frontman Alexei Winer's typically weird sense of humor - a pseudo festival, while he calls his band "a phantom, the band that has never existed. |
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 MOSCOW - Moscow developers in the 1990s built great towers of glass, hoisted dizzying neon signs along once-gray avenues and invested millions of dollars in shimmering new buildings whose main architectural style was best described by one critic as "late Las Vegas. |
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Jet Set, the branch of the notorious, all-elitist Moscow nightclub of the same name, began operating in St. Petersburg in December. But though aimed at titillating egos of would-be big shots, the club promises a surprisingly decent music program, which includes such acts as Portishead and Morcheeba some time this year. |
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Connoisseurs of Greek cuisine will be happy to know that a pleasant new Greek restaurant has recently opened in the city's center. Billing itself as the "first Greek restaurant in St. |
 Closed to the public for nearly a century, St. Petersburg's Lomonosov Porcelain Factory Museum threw its doors open again over the New Year. On display are 600 masterpieces from over 260 years of Russian porcelain making - from luxurious ceremonial dinner services ordered by Catherine the Great to Bolshevik propaganda chess sets pitting nobles against Soviet workers and peasants. Russia's oldest producer of porcelain and one of the first in Europe, the Lomonosov Porcelain Factory was established in 1744 by decree of Peter the Great's daughter, Elizabeth. |
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 It took one ring to rule them all, and now there's one film to end it all, to bring to a close the cinematic epic of our time, the one by which all others will be judged. |
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William Shawcross, who made his journalistic reputation as the scourge of Henry Kissinger (in "Sideshow") has written a polemic ardently endorsing the war in Iraq. And that's not all. Shawcross also argues for the Bush administration's aggressive use of the doctrine of pre-emption, Donald Rumsfeld's distinction between old and new Europe, the neoconservative case for regime change, the perfidy of the French, the indispensability of the Americans and much else to gladden hearts in Washington. |
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Otospatsya: to catch up on one's sleep. One of the nice things about the holidays in Moscow is that after a few weeks of the worst traffic known to mankind, suddenly the roads free up as everyone either stays home to recover from hangovers or goes to the Alps or the Red Sea for a quick break. |
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Korean Minister Quits SEOUL (AP) - South Korea's foreign minister resigned Thursday, a day after President Roh Moo-hyun accused ministry officials of criticizing his foreign policy. Roh accepted Yoon Young-kwan's resignation, saying the Foreign Ministry was not fully backing his administration's policy of "independence" from Washington. |
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Issues Archive