Tuesday 29 December 2009
Iraq inks oil deal with Lukoil
consortium led by Russia's private oil giant Lukoil has inked preliminary deal with Iraq to develop the prized West Qurna Phase 2 field. Lukoil had partnered with Norway's Statiol ASA to bid to develop the 12.88 billion barrel southern oil field, the crown jewel of the 15 fields offered during Iraq's second postwar oil licensing round held earlier this month.The 20-year deal was signed Tuesday but still needs to be approved by Iraq's Cabinet. The deal was a coup for Lukoil, which was awarded the rights to develop the field in 1997 by Saddam Hussein only to see the contract rescinded five years later by the Iraqi dictator.The companies aim to produce 1.8 million barrels per day in 13 years, and will receive $1.15 per barrel produced.
Turkmenistan to Resume Gas Supplies to Russia
Russia will now pay European prices for Turkmen gas, Gazprom deputy chief executive Alexander Medvedev said.
Uplifting Tale of Leningrad Siege Wins Booker
Yelena Chizhova is the first St. Petersburg novelist to win the Russian Booker Prize in the 17-year history of the country’s most prestigious independent literary prize with her novel “A Time of Women.”
The novel looks at the consequences of the 900-day Siege of Leningrad during World War II. The siege is the setting for the lives of three women who are the novel’s central protagonists. Two of them have lost everything: their husbands, children and parents. The third, although much younger, is also deeply touched by the war.
Chizhova was given the prize at an awards ceremony earlier this month. Her victory was not entirely unexpected as she was short-listed twice before. The work is very much in line with Chizhova’s previous four novels, all of which focus on dramatic moments in history.
Andrei Ariyev, editor of the St. Petersburg literary journal Zvezda, which published “A Time of Women” in its pages and nominated it for the competition, said at a gathering to celebrate the victory last week that “A Time of Women” corresponds to Alexander Pushkin’s definition of the novel as “a historic epoch presented in the form of literary narration.”
In an interview, Chizhova said she based the novel’s central stories on what she heard from her grandmothers and others of their generation. The book produces a collective image of manifold suffering: those who remained in the city throughout the siege, those who were evacuated via Lake Ladoga, the many who were killed in the bombing and those who came back to live in the harsh poverty that followed the war.
Nevertheless, the author shows the misery indirectly, and a mood of tolerance and love prevails in the narrative. The technique of the composition is complex. It is narrated by an authorial voice into which extracts from the younger girl’s diary are inserted, providing the perspective of a 6-year-old.
Life proceeds on several levels. It is in the communal flat where the three women live, outside in the streets, in a church, at a factory, in food lines, in their conversations where they talk about their past, the years before the Revolution, their lives during the siege and the years of war; and then in the girl’s head, as she listens to all this, absorbing everything and then recording her impressions in her diary and drawings.
At first it seems that fate has been cruelest to the two older women, who are in their 50s, because they have lost all those who are dearest to them. They have seen better times and can compare them with the present. Antonina, on the other hand, is a representative of the younger, postwar generation. Her life is one of overwhelming poverty and hunger. She raises her 6-year-old mute daughter on her own and lives in permanent fear that Sofia will be taken away from her and put in a state institution for handicapped children.
Sofia has no father and lives in extreme poverty, but she is the recipient of so much love that her childhood might easily be envied. The two older women, her neighbors, bestow their love upon her, standing in for both her parents when Antonina dies. Despite all this gloom, Chizhova manages to take readers away from the darkness and raise them up to the sky.
The girl grows up, enrolling in the Arts Academy, and we follow her life into the 1970s as the novel touches on issues such as emigration. Sofia hesitates as she faces the dilemma of whether to leave the Soviet Union and start a new life or stay near the graves of her loved ones. She feels that leaving them behind would be a betrayal. She stays to be with the souls of those who loved her so much knowing that they would have sacrificed their own lives for her without a moment’s hesitation.
Russia has not given us much in the way of uplifting and optimistic novels in recent years and the Booker has repeatedly been criticized for being clubby, remote and giving the award to books that no one reads. This year St. Petersburg has turned the page.
The novel looks at the consequences of the 900-day Siege of Leningrad during World War II. The siege is the setting for the lives of three women who are the novel’s central protagonists. Two of them have lost everything: their husbands, children and parents. The third, although much younger, is also deeply touched by the war.
Chizhova was given the prize at an awards ceremony earlier this month. Her victory was not entirely unexpected as she was short-listed twice before. The work is very much in line with Chizhova’s previous four novels, all of which focus on dramatic moments in history.
Andrei Ariyev, editor of the St. Petersburg literary journal Zvezda, which published “A Time of Women” in its pages and nominated it for the competition, said at a gathering to celebrate the victory last week that “A Time of Women” corresponds to Alexander Pushkin’s definition of the novel as “a historic epoch presented in the form of literary narration.”
In an interview, Chizhova said she based the novel’s central stories on what she heard from her grandmothers and others of their generation. The book produces a collective image of manifold suffering: those who remained in the city throughout the siege, those who were evacuated via Lake Ladoga, the many who were killed in the bombing and those who came back to live in the harsh poverty that followed the war.
Nevertheless, the author shows the misery indirectly, and a mood of tolerance and love prevails in the narrative. The technique of the composition is complex. It is narrated by an authorial voice into which extracts from the younger girl’s diary are inserted, providing the perspective of a 6-year-old.
Life proceeds on several levels. It is in the communal flat where the three women live, outside in the streets, in a church, at a factory, in food lines, in their conversations where they talk about their past, the years before the Revolution, their lives during the siege and the years of war; and then in the girl’s head, as she listens to all this, absorbing everything and then recording her impressions in her diary and drawings.
At first it seems that fate has been cruelest to the two older women, who are in their 50s, because they have lost all those who are dearest to them. They have seen better times and can compare them with the present. Antonina, on the other hand, is a representative of the younger, postwar generation. Her life is one of overwhelming poverty and hunger. She raises her 6-year-old mute daughter on her own and lives in permanent fear that Sofia will be taken away from her and put in a state institution for handicapped children.
Sofia has no father and lives in extreme poverty, but she is the recipient of so much love that her childhood might easily be envied. The two older women, her neighbors, bestow their love upon her, standing in for both her parents when Antonina dies. Despite all this gloom, Chizhova manages to take readers away from the darkness and raise them up to the sky.
The girl grows up, enrolling in the Arts Academy, and we follow her life into the 1970s as the novel touches on issues such as emigration. Sofia hesitates as she faces the dilemma of whether to leave the Soviet Union and start a new life or stay near the graves of her loved ones. She feels that leaving them behind would be a betrayal. She stays to be with the souls of those who loved her so much knowing that they would have sacrificed their own lives for her without a moment’s hesitation.
Russia has not given us much in the way of uplifting and optimistic novels in recent years and the Booker has repeatedly been criticized for being clubby, remote and giving the award to books that no one reads. This year St. Petersburg has turned the page.
Russia Will Save the West
Rapid changes in the global economy and international politics are raising once again an eternal issue in Russia: the country’s relations with Europe and with the Euro-Atlantic region as a whole. Of course, Russia partly belongs to this region, yet it cannot and does not want to join the West wholeheartedly — at least not yet. Meanwhile, this choice looks very different now compared with just a few years ago.
It is becoming obvious that the Euro-Atlantic world, whose economic and political model seemed so triumphant 20 years ago, is now lagging somewhat behind China and other Asian countries. So is Russia, where, despite encouraging talk about innovation-based development, the economy continues to demodernize as corruption has been allowed to metastasize and the country relies increasingly on its natural resource wealth. Indeed, it is Asia that has turned out to be the true winner of the Cold War.
These rising powers raise problems regarding Russia’s geostrategic choices. For the first time in decades, the values gap between Russia and the EU appears to be increasing. Europe is overcoming state nationalism, while Russia is building a nation state. Broken by history and not wishing to be ravaged by war again, Europeans have embraced compromise and renounced the direct use of force in international relations.
Russians, on the other hand, emphasize their “hard power,” including military force, because they know that they live in a dangerous world and have no one to hide behind. In addition, because of the country’s comparative lack of “soft power” — social, cultural and economic attractiveness — it stands ready to use the competitive advantages (that is, its resource wealth) available to it.
Internal political developments in Russia are also pushing the country in a different direction from the West. Quite simply, Russia is moving away from democracy.
This emerging values gap is not an insurmountable obstacle to geostrategic rapprochement. But coupled with mutual irritation, which is particularly strong in Russia, closing the gap is becoming much harder. While Russia’s elite never considered itself defeated in the Cold War, the West essentially treated Russia as a defeated country — an attitude symbolized by NATO’s eastward expansion, which laid a deep foundation for ongoing tension. It was only after the West encountered an armed rebuff in South Ossetia that NATO expansion was stopped in its tracks. Yet NATO has not given up on further enlargement.
NATO expansion is nothing more than the extension of its zone of influence — and in the most sensitive military and political spheres. And yet the West’s unwillingness to abandon that effort is coupled with a repeated refusal to recognize Russia’s right to have its own zone of interest.
So NATO expansion has left the Cold War unfinished. The ideological and military confrontation that underlay it is gone, but the geopolitical rivalry that it entailed has returned to the fore. Thus, the old mentality survived on both sides.
Energy debates are another example of this. Non-Russian Europe should thank the Almighty for the presence of energy-rich Russia at its borders, while Russia should be thankful for having such wealthy customers. But the natural differences in the interests of energy consumers and producers have been given a corrosive political and security twist. One vivid example of this is the discussion about an “Energy NATO.”
Faced with the impossibility of advantageous accession to Euro-Atlantic institutions, Russia is drifting fast toward alignment with China — a “younger brother,” though a respected one. Russia’s “Asian choice” of today is not the same as the Slavophile or Eurasian choice of the past. On the surface, it looks like a choice in favor of a rapidly rising civilization. But the current estrangement from Europe — the cradle of Russian civilization and modernization — threatens Russia’s identity and will increase its geostrategic risks in the future.
Europe does not benefit from this estrangement either. It will continue to move toward beautiful decay — Venice writ large. The United States also loses. Without Russia, which will remain the world’s third-strongest power for the foreseeable future, it is impossible to solve the key problems of international security.
The current Euro-Atlantic security architecture seems to suit the majority of Americans and Europeans, though it is becoming increasingly fragile and counterproductive. So Russia will struggle to create a new architecture largely on its own — whether through a new treaty on collective European security or even through its accession to NATO. This is not only in Russian political and civilizational interest, but it also reflects our duty to the entire community of Euro-Atlantic nations, which is being weakened by the “unfinished Cold War.”
The idea of a “Union of Europe” between Russia and the European Union should be put on the long-term agenda. That union should be based on a common human, economic and energy space. The combination of a new security arrangement for the Euro-Atlantic community and the establishment of the Union of Europe could curb the decline of the West.
It is becoming obvious that the Euro-Atlantic world, whose economic and political model seemed so triumphant 20 years ago, is now lagging somewhat behind China and other Asian countries. So is Russia, where, despite encouraging talk about innovation-based development, the economy continues to demodernize as corruption has been allowed to metastasize and the country relies increasingly on its natural resource wealth. Indeed, it is Asia that has turned out to be the true winner of the Cold War.
These rising powers raise problems regarding Russia’s geostrategic choices. For the first time in decades, the values gap between Russia and the EU appears to be increasing. Europe is overcoming state nationalism, while Russia is building a nation state. Broken by history and not wishing to be ravaged by war again, Europeans have embraced compromise and renounced the direct use of force in international relations.
Russians, on the other hand, emphasize their “hard power,” including military force, because they know that they live in a dangerous world and have no one to hide behind. In addition, because of the country’s comparative lack of “soft power” — social, cultural and economic attractiveness — it stands ready to use the competitive advantages (that is, its resource wealth) available to it.
Internal political developments in Russia are also pushing the country in a different direction from the West. Quite simply, Russia is moving away from democracy.
This emerging values gap is not an insurmountable obstacle to geostrategic rapprochement. But coupled with mutual irritation, which is particularly strong in Russia, closing the gap is becoming much harder. While Russia’s elite never considered itself defeated in the Cold War, the West essentially treated Russia as a defeated country — an attitude symbolized by NATO’s eastward expansion, which laid a deep foundation for ongoing tension. It was only after the West encountered an armed rebuff in South Ossetia that NATO expansion was stopped in its tracks. Yet NATO has not given up on further enlargement.
NATO expansion is nothing more than the extension of its zone of influence — and in the most sensitive military and political spheres. And yet the West’s unwillingness to abandon that effort is coupled with a repeated refusal to recognize Russia’s right to have its own zone of interest.
So NATO expansion has left the Cold War unfinished. The ideological and military confrontation that underlay it is gone, but the geopolitical rivalry that it entailed has returned to the fore. Thus, the old mentality survived on both sides.
Energy debates are another example of this. Non-Russian Europe should thank the Almighty for the presence of energy-rich Russia at its borders, while Russia should be thankful for having such wealthy customers. But the natural differences in the interests of energy consumers and producers have been given a corrosive political and security twist. One vivid example of this is the discussion about an “Energy NATO.”
Faced with the impossibility of advantageous accession to Euro-Atlantic institutions, Russia is drifting fast toward alignment with China — a “younger brother,” though a respected one. Russia’s “Asian choice” of today is not the same as the Slavophile or Eurasian choice of the past. On the surface, it looks like a choice in favor of a rapidly rising civilization. But the current estrangement from Europe — the cradle of Russian civilization and modernization — threatens Russia’s identity and will increase its geostrategic risks in the future.
Europe does not benefit from this estrangement either. It will continue to move toward beautiful decay — Venice writ large. The United States also loses. Without Russia, which will remain the world’s third-strongest power for the foreseeable future, it is impossible to solve the key problems of international security.
The current Euro-Atlantic security architecture seems to suit the majority of Americans and Europeans, though it is becoming increasingly fragile and counterproductive. So Russia will struggle to create a new architecture largely on its own — whether through a new treaty on collective European security or even through its accession to NATO. This is not only in Russian political and civilizational interest, but it also reflects our duty to the entire community of Euro-Atlantic nations, which is being weakened by the “unfinished Cold War.”
The idea of a “Union of Europe” between Russia and the European Union should be put on the long-term agenda. That union should be based on a common human, economic and energy space. The combination of a new security arrangement for the Euro-Atlantic community and the establishment of the Union of Europe could curb the decline of the West.
Rothschild Linked to RusAl’s IPO
Nathaniel Rothschild’s private investment company may buy shares in United Company RusAl’s $2 billion Hong Kong initial public offering, three people familiar with the plan said Monday.
Paulson & Co., the New York hedge fund run by billionaire John Paulson, and Vneshekonombank also may be among so-called “cornerstone” investors guaranteed shares in the IPO in exchange for a pledge not to sell them for a number of months, the people said. They declined to be identified because the information is private.
BlackRock, the world’s largest asset manager, has expressed interest in buying shares, though it would not invest as a cornerstone, one of the people said.
Billionaire Oleg Deripaska is trying to secure investors for the IPO, which will make RusAl the first Russian firm to list in Hong Kong. VEB may buy as much as a 3 percent, while other state-run lenders may also buy shares.
RusAl’s board approved a price that valued the company at $16 billion to $22 billion, the people said, declining to give a per share price. RusAl plans to start gauging demand for the sale Jan. 4 and begin an investor roadshow Jan. 12, one of the people said. The company declined to comment on possible investor interest in the IPO.
Rothschild, 38, a member of the famous banking family and co-chairman of New York hedge fund firm Atticus Capital, is a friend and an adviser to Deripaska.
Paulson & Co., the New York hedge fund run by billionaire John Paulson, and Vneshekonombank also may be among so-called “cornerstone” investors guaranteed shares in the IPO in exchange for a pledge not to sell them for a number of months, the people said. They declined to be identified because the information is private.
BlackRock, the world’s largest asset manager, has expressed interest in buying shares, though it would not invest as a cornerstone, one of the people said.
Billionaire Oleg Deripaska is trying to secure investors for the IPO, which will make RusAl the first Russian firm to list in Hong Kong. VEB may buy as much as a 3 percent, while other state-run lenders may also buy shares.
RusAl’s board approved a price that valued the company at $16 billion to $22 billion, the people said, declining to give a per share price. RusAl plans to start gauging demand for the sale Jan. 4 and begin an investor roadshow Jan. 12, one of the people said. The company declined to comment on possible investor interest in the IPO.
Rothschild, 38, a member of the famous banking family and co-chairman of New York hedge fund firm Atticus Capital, is a friend and an adviser to Deripaska.
Moscow Hikes Rent for McDonald’s
McDonald’s will have to start paying an annual 1,200 rubles ($40) per square meter, instead of 1 ruble, for properties on the Arbat and Bolshoi Nikolopeskovsky Pereulok after a court canceled its long-term contract with the city.
The Moscow Arbitration Court approved a suit brought by the city forcing the restaurant chain to increase its rent, an official in the city property department told Vedomosti.
In July 2009, the department filed two suits against Moskva-Makdonalds seeking to overturn the rental rates for a 1,577-square-meter restaurant on the Arbat and a 859-square-meter training center on Bolshoi Nikolopeskovsky Pereulok. The city approved the rental rates for 49 years in 1992, when it was still the controlling shareholder in the joint venture with McDonald’s.
In 1996, McDonald’s Restaurants of Canada purchased 31 percent of the joint venture, and in 2005, it bought the remaining 20 percent to become its single shareholder. For most of the company’s properties rented from the city, the rates were gradually increased, but the rate of 1 ruble per square meter was kept for these two buildings.
Starting in 2010, McDonald’s will have to pay the new rate, which is the minimum rent for municipal property in Moscow, the City Hall official said. McDonald’s will likely appeal, forcing the city to continue in court, he added.
A spokesperson for McDonald’s in Russia declined comment, saying the company had not seen the decision.
The property department has been in court with the company since 2007. Two lower courts had ruled against the department, which had been seeking to raise the rate to 18,883 rubles annually, before the latest decision increased it to the city minimum.
The Moscow Arbitration Court approved a suit brought by the city forcing the restaurant chain to increase its rent, an official in the city property department told Vedomosti.
In July 2009, the department filed two suits against Moskva-Makdonalds seeking to overturn the rental rates for a 1,577-square-meter restaurant on the Arbat and a 859-square-meter training center on Bolshoi Nikolopeskovsky Pereulok. The city approved the rental rates for 49 years in 1992, when it was still the controlling shareholder in the joint venture with McDonald’s.
In 1996, McDonald’s Restaurants of Canada purchased 31 percent of the joint venture, and in 2005, it bought the remaining 20 percent to become its single shareholder. For most of the company’s properties rented from the city, the rates were gradually increased, but the rate of 1 ruble per square meter was kept for these two buildings.
Starting in 2010, McDonald’s will have to pay the new rate, which is the minimum rent for municipal property in Moscow, the City Hall official said. McDonald’s will likely appeal, forcing the city to continue in court, he added.
A spokesperson for McDonald’s in Russia declined comment, saying the company had not seen the decision.
The property department has been in court with the company since 2007. Two lower courts had ruled against the department, which had been seeking to raise the rate to 18,883 rubles annually, before the latest decision increased it to the city minimum.
People Who Block Roads Face Prison
The government has submitted a bill to the State Duma that would boost fines and introduce prison terms for protesters who block roads.
Hundreds of unpaid workers blocked a highway in the Leningrad region town of Pikalyovo in June, prompting Prime Minister Vladimir Putin to fly into the town and force factory owners, including billionaire Oleg Deripaska, to pay wage arrears.
A demonstrator who blocks a road would be punished by a fine of up to 100,000 rubles ($3,370), a fine equal to six months of his wages, or up to two years in prison, according to the bill posted on the Duma’s web site.
The law currently imposes a punishment of up to 1,500 rubles ($50) for an individual who “intentionally disturbs road traffic.”
The bill also introduces a fine of up to 80,000 rubles ($2,690) for transportation officials who fail to prevent an accident on public transportation that causes serious injuries or property damages of more than 500,000 rubles ($16,830).
A transportation official could be imprisoned for up to five years if the accident killed one person and up to seven years if it killed two or more people.
The bill was drafted in part as a response to “the growing threat of terrorist acts” on public transportation and on public transportation links, the government said in a note attached to the bill.
A bomb explosion derailed the train Nevsky Express in late November, killing 27 people.
The bill was submitted Thursday, the Duma’s web site said. A date for the first reading of the legislation hasn’t been set.
The bill is the state’s latest initiative to prevent protests after several major roads were blocked by angry workers this year. The protests have stirred the Kremlin’s fears of social unrest amid the economic crisis, and President Dmitry Medvedev has warned governors that they face dismissal if they don’t keep protesters away from major roads.
Bankers and Bureaucrats Predict a Tough 2010
As bankers and government officials were clearing out for the New Year’s holiday this week, there was little cause for cheer. Their full-year targets and forecasts were shattered by a global banking collapse, and no one was in the mood to bet on the coming 12 months.
There was a consensus: It’s going to be bad.
But as the Russian economy has begun to stabilize, the country’s prognosticators are returning to the table, and with them comes the task of manufacturing — and managing — expectations.
The government has stayed cautious with its full-year gross domestic product forecasts, trying to find figures that can’t fall short but that will also be of some use for budget planning. Banks are more optimistic on the economy’s prospects, but they also warn that the return to growth could start pushing prices back up.
“If the government’s forecast is below the real figures, then that’s OK, but when the official forecast looks too optimistic by the end of the year, the government faces political consequences,” said Vladimir Tikhomirov, chief economist at UralSib.
The Economic Development Ministry last week updated the three scenarios for its 2010 economic forecast, with pessimistic growth of 1.3 percent, a baseline scenario of 3.1 percent and possible growth of 3.5 percent if oil prices continue to stay above the $58 per barrel forecast used to calculate the 2010 budget.
The ministry’s pessimistic scenario sees an average Urals crude price of $58 to $60 per barrel and combined GDP growth of about 5.3 percent for 2010-2012. The base scenario puts crude at $65 per barrel in 2010, increasing to $70 to $71 in the next two years for three-year GDP growth of 11.1 percent.
The optimistic scenario predicts that crude will average $69 next year, $74 in 2011 and $81 in 2012 — bringing GDP past the precrisis 2008 level by 2.7 percent.
“We forecast that the economic results in Russia in 2010 will be much better than official government forecasts,” UralSib analysts wrote in a research paper. They said GDP would fall 6.9 percent in 2009, year on year, better than the ministry’s expected drop of 8.5 percent.
The economy will return to growth of 5.5 percent in 2010 and 5.9 percent the following year, they said.
Alexander Osin, chief economist at Finam, had a more cautious forecast, although it was still at the high end of the Economic Development Ministry’s guidelines. GDP will grow 3.5 percent in 2010, with a major upturn of 1.4 percent quarter-on-quarter growth coming in the third quarter before slowing back to a quarterly rise of 0.6 in the last three months of 2010, he said.
“GDP growth will be driven by increases in budget expenses and a net export surplus, and therefore we assume the peak of these activities will be in the second and third quarter,” Osin said.
Increased social spending added 2.9 trillion rubles ($97 billion) to the 2010 deficit, according to federal budget documents published earlier this month.
Another major point of contention was inflation, which is now widely expected to register at about 9 percent for 2009.
The government forecasts inflation of 8.8 percent to 9 percent for 2009, according to last week’s revised Economic Development Ministry numbers. Next year, prices may rise 6.5 percent to 7.5 percent, it said.
“The positive momentum of lower inflation is expected to continue into the first half of 2010, as the lower rate in the second half of 2009 came partly from seasonal factors (cheaper food) and partly because of the change in the Central Bank’s monetary policy,” the report said. “Expect a higher global inflation trend from mid-2010, and that will have some contagion for Russia. The expected general economic improvement in Russia by midyear will also add inflationary pressures.”
Anton Pletenev, an analyst at Raiffeisenbank, said he expected average inflation of 8.5 percent to 9 percent next year, while Finam’s Osin said the figure would be 9 percent to 11 percent, depending on what the state does.
And while the Economic Development Ministry may have submitted its best guesses, that hasn’t stopped senior policy makers from offering their macro forecasts for 2010. A number of top officials, most recently President Dmitry Medvedev, have said the economy could grow 5 percent next year — although virtually all have attributed the figure to “experts.”
Alexei Ulyukayev, a Central Bank first deputy chairman, and the Komsomolskaya Pravda newspaper in October made a bet — setting the consumer basket of goods used to calculate the effects of inflation on households as their wager — that full year inflation for 2009 would be less than 11 percent.
The newspaper on Monday conceded defeat and said it would pay him a “consumer basket of the future,” including caviar, crab meat and pineapple instead of the standard items like flour, eggs and sugar.
Last year, Ulyukayev lost a similar bet with Izvestia. He delivered a case of wine to the newspaper after inflation turned out to be higher than in 2007.
Economic Forecasts for 2010
Indicator
Average
Median
Min / Max
GDP, %
3.3
3.3
-1 / 7
Inflation, %
8.3
8.5
5.5 / 11
Industrial Production, %
4.1
4.7
-3 / 8.2
Fixed capital investment, %
5.3
4.2
-4 / 20
Retail goods sales, %
4.2
4
0.5 / 10
Nominal wages, &
8.5
9.3
1.2 / 16.6
Real household incomes, %
3.4
3.1
1 / 8.4
Exports, $Bln
358
353
290 / 413
Imports, $Bln
230
226
184 / 270
Current account balance, $Bln
56
61
16 / 103
Capital inflows / outflows, $Bln
10
16.5
-60 / 60
Direct foreign investment, $Bln
39
45.5
6 / 70
Central Bank refinancing rate
7.9
8
6.5 / 9
Lending rate to nonfinancial sector
12
12.3
10 / 13.6
Increase in lending volume to nonfinancial sector, %
11.4
10
6 / 18
Increase in consumer lending volume, %
9.5
7.6
2 / 18
Average Urals crude price, $ / barrel
72.1
73.4
60 / 90
Ruble / dollar rate at the end of 2010
28.4
28.5
26.2 / 33
Unemployment, %
7.7
7.6
7 / 9
Participants: Alfa Bank, Bank of Moscow, BDO Unicon, Center for Macroeconomic Analysis and Short-Term Forecasting, Citibank, Higher School of Economics’ Development Center, HSBC, ING, Merrill Lynch, Otkritie, Renaissance Capital, Sberbank Macroeconomic Forecasting Center, Troika Dialog, Trust National Bank, UralSib
There was a consensus: It’s going to be bad.
But as the Russian economy has begun to stabilize, the country’s prognosticators are returning to the table, and with them comes the task of manufacturing — and managing — expectations.
The government has stayed cautious with its full-year gross domestic product forecasts, trying to find figures that can’t fall short but that will also be of some use for budget planning. Banks are more optimistic on the economy’s prospects, but they also warn that the return to growth could start pushing prices back up.
“If the government’s forecast is below the real figures, then that’s OK, but when the official forecast looks too optimistic by the end of the year, the government faces political consequences,” said Vladimir Tikhomirov, chief economist at UralSib.
The Economic Development Ministry last week updated the three scenarios for its 2010 economic forecast, with pessimistic growth of 1.3 percent, a baseline scenario of 3.1 percent and possible growth of 3.5 percent if oil prices continue to stay above the $58 per barrel forecast used to calculate the 2010 budget.
The ministry’s pessimistic scenario sees an average Urals crude price of $58 to $60 per barrel and combined GDP growth of about 5.3 percent for 2010-2012. The base scenario puts crude at $65 per barrel in 2010, increasing to $70 to $71 in the next two years for three-year GDP growth of 11.1 percent.
The optimistic scenario predicts that crude will average $69 next year, $74 in 2011 and $81 in 2012 — bringing GDP past the precrisis 2008 level by 2.7 percent.
“We forecast that the economic results in Russia in 2010 will be much better than official government forecasts,” UralSib analysts wrote in a research paper. They said GDP would fall 6.9 percent in 2009, year on year, better than the ministry’s expected drop of 8.5 percent.
The economy will return to growth of 5.5 percent in 2010 and 5.9 percent the following year, they said.
Alexander Osin, chief economist at Finam, had a more cautious forecast, although it was still at the high end of the Economic Development Ministry’s guidelines. GDP will grow 3.5 percent in 2010, with a major upturn of 1.4 percent quarter-on-quarter growth coming in the third quarter before slowing back to a quarterly rise of 0.6 in the last three months of 2010, he said.
“GDP growth will be driven by increases in budget expenses and a net export surplus, and therefore we assume the peak of these activities will be in the second and third quarter,” Osin said.
Increased social spending added 2.9 trillion rubles ($97 billion) to the 2010 deficit, according to federal budget documents published earlier this month.
Another major point of contention was inflation, which is now widely expected to register at about 9 percent for 2009.
The government forecasts inflation of 8.8 percent to 9 percent for 2009, according to last week’s revised Economic Development Ministry numbers. Next year, prices may rise 6.5 percent to 7.5 percent, it said.
“The positive momentum of lower inflation is expected to continue into the first half of 2010, as the lower rate in the second half of 2009 came partly from seasonal factors (cheaper food) and partly because of the change in the Central Bank’s monetary policy,” the report said. “Expect a higher global inflation trend from mid-2010, and that will have some contagion for Russia. The expected general economic improvement in Russia by midyear will also add inflationary pressures.”
Anton Pletenev, an analyst at Raiffeisenbank, said he expected average inflation of 8.5 percent to 9 percent next year, while Finam’s Osin said the figure would be 9 percent to 11 percent, depending on what the state does.
And while the Economic Development Ministry may have submitted its best guesses, that hasn’t stopped senior policy makers from offering their macro forecasts for 2010. A number of top officials, most recently President Dmitry Medvedev, have said the economy could grow 5 percent next year — although virtually all have attributed the figure to “experts.”
Alexei Ulyukayev, a Central Bank first deputy chairman, and the Komsomolskaya Pravda newspaper in October made a bet — setting the consumer basket of goods used to calculate the effects of inflation on households as their wager — that full year inflation for 2009 would be less than 11 percent.
The newspaper on Monday conceded defeat and said it would pay him a “consumer basket of the future,” including caviar, crab meat and pineapple instead of the standard items like flour, eggs and sugar.
Last year, Ulyukayev lost a similar bet with Izvestia. He delivered a case of wine to the newspaper after inflation turned out to be higher than in 2007.
Economic Forecasts for 2010
Indicator
Average
Median
Min / Max
GDP, %
3.3
3.3
-1 / 7
Inflation, %
8.3
8.5
5.5 / 11
Industrial Production, %
4.1
4.7
-3 / 8.2
Fixed capital investment, %
5.3
4.2
-4 / 20
Retail goods sales, %
4.2
4
0.5 / 10
Nominal wages, &
8.5
9.3
1.2 / 16.6
Real household incomes, %
3.4
3.1
1 / 8.4
Exports, $Bln
358
353
290 / 413
Imports, $Bln
230
226
184 / 270
Current account balance, $Bln
56
61
16 / 103
Capital inflows / outflows, $Bln
10
16.5
-60 / 60
Direct foreign investment, $Bln
39
45.5
6 / 70
Central Bank refinancing rate
7.9
8
6.5 / 9
Lending rate to nonfinancial sector
12
12.3
10 / 13.6
Increase in lending volume to nonfinancial sector, %
11.4
10
6 / 18
Increase in consumer lending volume, %
9.5
7.6
2 / 18
Average Urals crude price, $ / barrel
72.1
73.4
60 / 90
Ruble / dollar rate at the end of 2010
28.4
28.5
26.2 / 33
Unemployment, %
7.7
7.6
7 / 9
Participants: Alfa Bank, Bank of Moscow, BDO Unicon, Center for Macroeconomic Analysis and Short-Term Forecasting, Citibank, Higher School of Economics’ Development Center, HSBC, ING, Merrill Lynch, Otkritie, Renaissance Capital, Sberbank Macroeconomic Forecasting Center, Troika Dialog, Trust National Bank, UralSib
$700M Shipyards Planned for Far East
Prime Minister Vladimir Putin on Monday announced plans for the state-run United Shipbuilding Corporation to build two major infrastructure projects with foreign partners, with investments of a combined $700 million.
He also said the government had created a $5 billion plan for the purchase of civilian ships and related technology in the Far East through 2020, a move that he said was crucial to ensuring the new ventures’ success.
“Above all, we’re talking about orders from our largest companies — Gazprom, Rosneft and Sovkomflot — as well as deliveries of fishing and other specialized ships,” Putin told a meeting of government and industry officials in Vladivostok, according to a transcript posted on the government web site.
He also oversaw the signing of six shipbuilding contracts, the government said in a separate statement.
The first infrastructure project, with Singapore’s Yantai Raffles Shipyard, will create a new shipyard to build drilling platforms in Chazhma Bay. The second is with South Korea’s Daewoo to construct a dry dock at the existing Zvezda factory in the nearby town of Bolshoi Kamen to make tankers, including for liquefied natural gas.
Both projects are in the Primorye region.
Vneshekonombank, the state development bank, said in a statement on its web site that it had opened a one-year credit line of up to 1 billion rubles ($33.7 million) to help finance initial work to build the shipyard.
Putin said 75 percent of the $700 million in financing would come from Russian sources, without giving a breakdown for the two projects.
Separately, Gazprom deputy chief Alexander Ananenkov said the company planned to spend $2 billion on four tankers from the shipyard project with Daewoo. The vessels would be for Gazprom’s Shtokman deposit in the Arctic, Ananenkov said, with a planned delivery date of 2015 or 2016.
Gazprom is also planning to order two supply ships for a combined 2 billion rubles, he said.
On Friday, First Deputy Prime Minister Viktor Zubkov, who is also Gazprom chairman, said the company might push back the launch of the Shtokman development, without giving a time frame. It is currently scheduled to go on line in 2013.
Vladimir Savov, head of research at Otkritie, commended the investments in the region, saying the Far East had been somewhat neglected. With the rapid economic growth in Asia, “Russia needs more presence there,” he said.
Vladivostok is the site of Russia’s second-largest infrastructure development project, after the 2014 Sochi Olympics. The city is preparing to host the Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation forum in 2012.
He also said the government had created a $5 billion plan for the purchase of civilian ships and related technology in the Far East through 2020, a move that he said was crucial to ensuring the new ventures’ success.
“Above all, we’re talking about orders from our largest companies — Gazprom, Rosneft and Sovkomflot — as well as deliveries of fishing and other specialized ships,” Putin told a meeting of government and industry officials in Vladivostok, according to a transcript posted on the government web site.
He also oversaw the signing of six shipbuilding contracts, the government said in a separate statement.
The first infrastructure project, with Singapore’s Yantai Raffles Shipyard, will create a new shipyard to build drilling platforms in Chazhma Bay. The second is with South Korea’s Daewoo to construct a dry dock at the existing Zvezda factory in the nearby town of Bolshoi Kamen to make tankers, including for liquefied natural gas.
Both projects are in the Primorye region.
Vneshekonombank, the state development bank, said in a statement on its web site that it had opened a one-year credit line of up to 1 billion rubles ($33.7 million) to help finance initial work to build the shipyard.
Putin said 75 percent of the $700 million in financing would come from Russian sources, without giving a breakdown for the two projects.
Separately, Gazprom deputy chief Alexander Ananenkov said the company planned to spend $2 billion on four tankers from the shipyard project with Daewoo. The vessels would be for Gazprom’s Shtokman deposit in the Arctic, Ananenkov said, with a planned delivery date of 2015 or 2016.
Gazprom is also planning to order two supply ships for a combined 2 billion rubles, he said.
On Friday, First Deputy Prime Minister Viktor Zubkov, who is also Gazprom chairman, said the company might push back the launch of the Shtokman development, without giving a time frame. It is currently scheduled to go on line in 2013.
Vladimir Savov, head of research at Otkritie, commended the investments in the region, saying the Far East had been somewhat neglected. With the rapid economic growth in Asia, “Russia needs more presence there,” he said.
Vladivostok is the site of Russia’s second-largest infrastructure development project, after the 2014 Sochi Olympics. The city is preparing to host the Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation forum in 2012.
Shoplifters Take ‘Hobby’ Online
As Moscow stores see a surge in shoplifting ahead of the New Year’s holidays, at least part of their problems can be traced to an unlikely source: a LiveJournal community of dedicated shoplifters.
A successfully stolen lipstick or eyelash mascara provides a rush of euphoria, said Yulia, a 30-year-old Moscow journalist and amateur shoplifter who blogs about her adventures on the LiveJournal community, whose Russian name, which contains an obscenity, could be loosely translated as “Snatch It and You Are Happy.”
Yulia and other members of the community — who spoke on condition of anonymity, citing fear of arrest — said they do not steal because of the economic crisis or a lack of money but rather as a hobby. They go online to boast of their booty and share their shoplifting techniques.
“I can buy everything that I obtain from this hobby without hurting my wallet,” said Alexander, a 26-year-old Moscow sales manager who has shoplifted for the past five years.
Shoplifting is a major problem at any time of the year, with many stores mounting surveillance cameras on the ceilings and posting security guards by the exits, but the issue grows more acute ahead of New Year’s, some retailers said.
The supermarket chain Pyatyorochka sees a 10 percent jump in shoplifting ahead of New Year’s in its stores in Moscow and other cities, said Svetlana Vitkovskaya, a spokeswoman for the chain’s parent company, X5 Retail Group.
She had no precise figures for stolen goods for previous years and said this year’s figures would be available in January.
The supermarket chain Sedmoi Kontinent refused to comment altogether about shoplifting and several other major stores didn’t return requests for comment.
Police do not keep statistics on shoplifting but lump all thefts together, said city police spokeswoman Svetlana Serkina.
The Criminal Code imposes a punishment of up to two years in prison for shoplifting.
Yulia, who first shoplifted as a teen by taking a can of stewed fruit, said she steals for the adrenalin rush or to lift her spirits when she is stressed out.
But she insisted that she would not join pre-New Year’s shoplifters this year in pilfering merchandise — or at least until Dec. 31.
“I am a fan of snatching cosmetics. I have not used up what I previously stole,” Yulia told The Moscow Times by e-mail.
Alexander, the Moscow sales manager, said by e-mail that he views the thefts as “interesting entertainment” that “detects the shortfalls of a store’s security system.”
He said his friends expressed disapproval when they first learned about his activities, but after a while they started begging him to share techniques in order to shoplift themselves.
Sergei, a 37-year-old engineer, said he steals for “pleasure” and then gives away the loot, usually ashtrays and dishes from restaurants. He said he once slipped a beer mug into the bag of an unwitting girlfriend at a cafe.
Yulia said she honed her stealing skills by snatching tomatoes, tangerines and even garlic from outdoor market stalls when she was a student.
Alexander said he mostly stole clothes and expensive alcohol, as well as “useless little things.”
LiveJournal members said they were not afraid of getting arrested.
Sergei said he has never gotten caught, while Yulia has been caught twice but managed to avoid arrest. The first time, shop managers felt sorry for Yulia because she was a minor, and the second time she sweet-talked a policeman into letting her go after store security guards caught her making off with two bottles of hand and face lotion, she said.
Police officials could not be reached for comment on the activities of the LiveJournal community Monday. Serkina, the police spokeswoman, directed inquiries to Moscow police’s criminal investigation department, which in turn referred a reporter to the Interior Ministry’s department fighting high-tech crimes. Repeated calls to the department went unanswered, and the ministry’s press service did not reply to a faxed request for comment.
Although members of the LiveJournal community boast about their exploits on the Internet, many voiced reluctance and even hostility about talking to a reporter, even on condition of anonymity, saying they did not want to attract attention to their community for fear of being tracked down by the police. A reporter who posted an interview request on the community’s blog received a flood of angry replies, including many containing obscenities. “You’ll rat on us and reveal all our tricks,” wrote a user with the nickname Perlinnoise.
Father Ioasaf, a senior clergyman at Moscow’s Zaikonospassky Monastery, said shoplifting was not a hobby but “an expression of a particular frame of mind — wickedness.”
He said shoplifting violated one of the Ten Commandments — “Thou shalt not steal” — and the LiveJournal members were “disseminating evil.”
“Apparently, these people have not known God’s love,” he said.
Putin Launches Pacific Oil Terminal
Russia expanded its foothold on the Asian energy market with the click of a mouse Monday.
Prime Minister Vladimir Putin pressed a button to get Siberian oil flowing into the first tanker for delivery to an Asian customer, in Hong Kong, from Russia’s Pacific coast. In addition to China, supplies will also target Japan and South Korea.
The ceremony completed four years of work to construct the East Siberia-Pacific Ocean pipeline and the Kozmino port, worth a combined 420 billion rubles ($14 billion) to ease the industry’s reliance on the European market.
“It’s a strategic project because it allows us to enter the completely new, growing and promising markets of the Asian-Pacific region,” Putin said at the launch. “It’s a great present to Russia for the New Year.”
The foray into the Asian oil market follows Russia’s arrival as a major supplier of liquefied natural gas, or LNG, for its eastern neighbors earlier this year. The Gazprom-led Sakhalin-2 project — with Shell, Mitsui and Mitsubishi as partners — started shipping the gas, chilled to a liquid for loading into tankers, from Russia’s offshore fields in the Pacific in February.
As it expands into new markets, Russia is keeping abreast of the global trend of diversification among both energy buyers and sellers, which will make the business more competitive worldwide, said Elena Shadrina, a visiting energy researcher at the Norwegian Institute for Defense Studies.
“No supplier or consumer will have a dominant position,” she said by telephone from Oslo.
Europe is trying to offset its dependence on gas imports from Russia by looking to buy more from Africa, while Turkmenistan began exporting its gas to China earlier this month, ending Russia’s role as its only major buyer. Asia, in turn, has been seeking alternatives to supplies from the Middle East.
Russia’s progress in eastward expansion has been spectacular, defying doubts that the country has sufficient oil reserves and investment, Shadrina said.
“As little as five years ago, I heard skeptical attitudes from Japanese officials and analysts,” she said. “The tone has really changed now.”
The Kozmino port, near Vladivostok, cost $2 billion to build and has the capacity to handle 300,000 barrels of crude per day (15 million tons per year), with oil quality comparable to that of Middle Eastern blends now dominating the market.
Transneft, the state pipeline monopoly, spent another $12 billion to lay the 2,694-kilometer ESPO pipeline through east Siberian wilderness to connect the area’s greenfields, being developed by oil majors Rosneft, TNK-BP and Surgutneftegaz, to the railway station of Skovorodino. The link has the capacity to carry 30 million tons a year.
Arriving in Skovorodino, the crude is loaded onto trains to travel to the port by rail.
Transneft plans to start building the rest of the pipeline to Kozmino, which requires an estimated investment of $10 billion, next year and complete the work in 2014. The effort will bring the link’s total length to 4,794 kilometers, which is more than the distance from New York to Los Angeles.
When completed, the pipeline will carry eastward an annual 80 million tons of oil from Siberia, including 15 million tons to China through an additional spur. China has loaned $25 billion to Russia in exchange for oil deliveries over the next two decades. Kozmino will increase capacity to 600,000 barrels per day, or 30 million tons per year.
Seeking the huge investment for the remote east Siberian greenfields that are to feed the pipeline, Russia will likely ease access to these resources by foreign oil majors, said Shamil Yenikeyeff, a researcher at the Oxford Institute for Energy Studies. A law enacted last year allows the government to take away a field from a foreign company if it strikes large oil reserves there during exploration, a restriction that put off potential investors, such as Royal Dutch Shell.
Yenikeyeff said Russia’s emergence this year as an Asian energy power — while being a wise policy — displayed the country’s continuing reliance on oil and gas exports for economic prosperity.
“You may call this a new era,” he said, referring to the unlocking of new markets. “The question is: Does this mean that Russia will grow even more affected by the oil curse? If you look at the other industries, nothing is happening there.”
The first tanker’s crude that left Kozmino belongs to state-controlled Rosneft and represents a new oil blend named ESPO, after the pipeline. The low-sulphur, medium-heavy sweet blend ranks higher than Russia’s main export blend, Urals, but its quality is going to be unstable for a while as more producers pump their oil in the pipeline.
The price of the crude is tentatively based on the average monthly price of the Middle Eastern benchmark Dubai blend, with the option for traders to offer a discount or premium. Rosneft sold the first shipment to the Finnish trader IPP Oy at a premium of 50 cents.
Prime Minister Vladimir Putin pressed a button to get Siberian oil flowing into the first tanker for delivery to an Asian customer, in Hong Kong, from Russia’s Pacific coast. In addition to China, supplies will also target Japan and South Korea.
The ceremony completed four years of work to construct the East Siberia-Pacific Ocean pipeline and the Kozmino port, worth a combined 420 billion rubles ($14 billion) to ease the industry’s reliance on the European market.
“It’s a strategic project because it allows us to enter the completely new, growing and promising markets of the Asian-Pacific region,” Putin said at the launch. “It’s a great present to Russia for the New Year.”
The foray into the Asian oil market follows Russia’s arrival as a major supplier of liquefied natural gas, or LNG, for its eastern neighbors earlier this year. The Gazprom-led Sakhalin-2 project — with Shell, Mitsui and Mitsubishi as partners — started shipping the gas, chilled to a liquid for loading into tankers, from Russia’s offshore fields in the Pacific in February.
As it expands into new markets, Russia is keeping abreast of the global trend of diversification among both energy buyers and sellers, which will make the business more competitive worldwide, said Elena Shadrina, a visiting energy researcher at the Norwegian Institute for Defense Studies.
“No supplier or consumer will have a dominant position,” she said by telephone from Oslo.
Europe is trying to offset its dependence on gas imports from Russia by looking to buy more from Africa, while Turkmenistan began exporting its gas to China earlier this month, ending Russia’s role as its only major buyer. Asia, in turn, has been seeking alternatives to supplies from the Middle East.
Russia’s progress in eastward expansion has been spectacular, defying doubts that the country has sufficient oil reserves and investment, Shadrina said.
“As little as five years ago, I heard skeptical attitudes from Japanese officials and analysts,” she said. “The tone has really changed now.”
The Kozmino port, near Vladivostok, cost $2 billion to build and has the capacity to handle 300,000 barrels of crude per day (15 million tons per year), with oil quality comparable to that of Middle Eastern blends now dominating the market.
Transneft, the state pipeline monopoly, spent another $12 billion to lay the 2,694-kilometer ESPO pipeline through east Siberian wilderness to connect the area’s greenfields, being developed by oil majors Rosneft, TNK-BP and Surgutneftegaz, to the railway station of Skovorodino. The link has the capacity to carry 30 million tons a year.
Arriving in Skovorodino, the crude is loaded onto trains to travel to the port by rail.
Transneft plans to start building the rest of the pipeline to Kozmino, which requires an estimated investment of $10 billion, next year and complete the work in 2014. The effort will bring the link’s total length to 4,794 kilometers, which is more than the distance from New York to Los Angeles.
When completed, the pipeline will carry eastward an annual 80 million tons of oil from Siberia, including 15 million tons to China through an additional spur. China has loaned $25 billion to Russia in exchange for oil deliveries over the next two decades. Kozmino will increase capacity to 600,000 barrels per day, or 30 million tons per year.
Seeking the huge investment for the remote east Siberian greenfields that are to feed the pipeline, Russia will likely ease access to these resources by foreign oil majors, said Shamil Yenikeyeff, a researcher at the Oxford Institute for Energy Studies. A law enacted last year allows the government to take away a field from a foreign company if it strikes large oil reserves there during exploration, a restriction that put off potential investors, such as Royal Dutch Shell.
Yenikeyeff said Russia’s emergence this year as an Asian energy power — while being a wise policy — displayed the country’s continuing reliance on oil and gas exports for economic prosperity.
“You may call this a new era,” he said, referring to the unlocking of new markets. “The question is: Does this mean that Russia will grow even more affected by the oil curse? If you look at the other industries, nothing is happening there.”
The first tanker’s crude that left Kozmino belongs to state-controlled Rosneft and represents a new oil blend named ESPO, after the pipeline. The low-sulphur, medium-heavy sweet blend ranks higher than Russia’s main export blend, Urals, but its quality is going to be unstable for a while as more producers pump their oil in the pipeline.
The price of the crude is tentatively based on the average monthly price of the Middle Eastern benchmark Dubai blend, with the option for traders to offer a discount or premium. Rosneft sold the first shipment to the Finnish trader IPP Oy at a premium of 50 cents.
Yevsyukov Partially Admits His Guilt
Denis Yevsyukov, the former police major accused of going on a shooting rampage in a Moscow supermarket in April, told a court Monday that he partially admitted to the charges, but he did not elaborate.
Yevsyukov, speaking on the first day of his trial in the Moscow City Court, is charged with two counts of murder and 22 counts of attempted murder in connection with a shooting spree in the Ostrov supermarket in southern Moscow in the early morning hours of April 27.
Guarded by a team of four police officers, Yevsyukov paid scant attention to the court proceedings from the defendant’s cage, taking notes and speaking occasionally to his lawyer, Yelena Bushuyeva.
He appeared relaxed and calm as one witness, Anton Kondakov, 23, recalled watching Yevsyukov unload his gun into late-night shoppers.
“He was sure of himself as he was firing,” Kondakov said.
Yevsyukov shot and injured Kondakov and his girlfriend, Yelena Samorodova, as he passed them on his way into the supermarket, prosecutors say.
The rampage started after Yevsyukov, the former head of the Tsaritsyno police precinct in southern Moscow, quarreled with his wife at his 32nd birthday party and hailed a gypsy taxi cab to the supermarket. He is accused of killing the cab driver and a female cashier in the supermarket. He was overwhelmed by a police patrol.
While Yevsyukov’s actions in the supermarket were documented by supermarket surveillance cameras, the circumstances surrounding the taxi driver’s death are murky, said Igor Trunov, a lawyer representing several people injured in the attack. “What happened inside the car is still like a blank paper for us,” he told reporters after the hearing.
In the courtroom, Yevsyukov’s lawyer Bushuyeva questioned the strength of the evidence proving the defendant’s guilt in the killing of the taxi driver, Sergei Yevteyev. Bushuyeva asked the driver’s sister Yelena to confirm that her brother had served seven years in prison for robbery during Soviet times.
The head judge, Dmitry Fomin, said Yevteyev’s robbery conviction was not part of Yevsyukov’s trial, but Trunov suggested that Bushuyeva might try to convince the court that the gun used in the shooting rampage belonged to Yevteyev, not Yevsyukov. Such a finding would force prosecutors to drop some of the charges against Yevsyukov.
Trunov said investigators had been unable to find Yevsyukov’s fingerprints inside Yevteyev’s car and on the murder weapon, a 9-millimeter Makarov pistol. He accused Yevsyukov of wiping off his fingerprints to destroy evidence.
Bushuyeva told Interfax that former Moscow police chief Vladimir Pronin would be among the defense’s witnesses. President Dmitry Medvedev fired Pronin in connection with the shooting spree.
Trunov has called Yevsyukov a protege of Pronin and said Pronin was a friend of Yevsyukov’s father, also a former senior police officer. Pronin has denied knowing Yevsyukov or his father personally and sued Trunov for slander.
A verdict in Yevsyukov’s trial is expected in March. He faces life in prison.
Yevsyukov, speaking on the first day of his trial in the Moscow City Court, is charged with two counts of murder and 22 counts of attempted murder in connection with a shooting spree in the Ostrov supermarket in southern Moscow in the early morning hours of April 27.
Guarded by a team of four police officers, Yevsyukov paid scant attention to the court proceedings from the defendant’s cage, taking notes and speaking occasionally to his lawyer, Yelena Bushuyeva.
He appeared relaxed and calm as one witness, Anton Kondakov, 23, recalled watching Yevsyukov unload his gun into late-night shoppers.
“He was sure of himself as he was firing,” Kondakov said.
Yevsyukov shot and injured Kondakov and his girlfriend, Yelena Samorodova, as he passed them on his way into the supermarket, prosecutors say.
The rampage started after Yevsyukov, the former head of the Tsaritsyno police precinct in southern Moscow, quarreled with his wife at his 32nd birthday party and hailed a gypsy taxi cab to the supermarket. He is accused of killing the cab driver and a female cashier in the supermarket. He was overwhelmed by a police patrol.
While Yevsyukov’s actions in the supermarket were documented by supermarket surveillance cameras, the circumstances surrounding the taxi driver’s death are murky, said Igor Trunov, a lawyer representing several people injured in the attack. “What happened inside the car is still like a blank paper for us,” he told reporters after the hearing.
In the courtroom, Yevsyukov’s lawyer Bushuyeva questioned the strength of the evidence proving the defendant’s guilt in the killing of the taxi driver, Sergei Yevteyev. Bushuyeva asked the driver’s sister Yelena to confirm that her brother had served seven years in prison for robbery during Soviet times.
The head judge, Dmitry Fomin, said Yevteyev’s robbery conviction was not part of Yevsyukov’s trial, but Trunov suggested that Bushuyeva might try to convince the court that the gun used in the shooting rampage belonged to Yevteyev, not Yevsyukov. Such a finding would force prosecutors to drop some of the charges against Yevsyukov.
Trunov said investigators had been unable to find Yevsyukov’s fingerprints inside Yevteyev’s car and on the murder weapon, a 9-millimeter Makarov pistol. He accused Yevsyukov of wiping off his fingerprints to destroy evidence.
Bushuyeva told Interfax that former Moscow police chief Vladimir Pronin would be among the defense’s witnesses. President Dmitry Medvedev fired Pronin in connection with the shooting spree.
Trunov has called Yevsyukov a protege of Pronin and said Pronin was a friend of Yevsyukov’s father, also a former senior police officer. Pronin has denied knowing Yevsyukov or his father personally and sued Trunov for slander.
A verdict in Yevsyukov’s trial is expected in March. He faces life in prison.
Ukraine To Develop Offshore Oil, Gas Fields In Black Sea
KIEV, Ukraine -- Ukraine is set to start developing offshore oil and gas fields in the Black Sea from 2010, the country's prime minister says.
"There are oil and gas reserves to last Ukraine for 150 years. From 2010 ... we will launch large-scale development at the expense of government funds," Yulia Tymoshenko said on Saturday.She said the offshore natural gas and oil reserves would belong to the nation, not to "certain corrupt groups."The Ukrainian government earlier planned to develop a section of the Black Sea shelf near the Kerch Strait together with the US oil company Vanco.The Kerch area's reserves are estimated at 10.8 billion cubic meters of natural gas. Production at this section would allow Ukraine to increase its annual gas production by 4 billion cubic meters, and oil by 3 million tons.Ukraine presently produces about 20 billion cubic meters of gas and 4 million tons of oil a year which is about 20 percent of its annual consumption.
"There are oil and gas reserves to last Ukraine for 150 years. From 2010 ... we will launch large-scale development at the expense of government funds," Yulia Tymoshenko said on Saturday.She said the offshore natural gas and oil reserves would belong to the nation, not to "certain corrupt groups."The Ukrainian government earlier planned to develop a section of the Black Sea shelf near the Kerch Strait together with the US oil company Vanco.The Kerch area's reserves are estimated at 10.8 billion cubic meters of natural gas. Production at this section would allow Ukraine to increase its annual gas production by 4 billion cubic meters, and oil by 3 million tons.Ukraine presently produces about 20 billion cubic meters of gas and 4 million tons of oil a year which is about 20 percent of its annual consumption.
Cynicism Replaces Tide Of Orange As Ukraine Returns To Polls
The euphoric optimism of Ukraine’s 2004 Orange Revolution has vanished like the tears of a long-spurned lover, replaced by profound cynicism as the country braces for its first presidential vote since that dramatic show of people power five years ago.
President Viktor Yushchenko, greeted as a hero during his 2008 Canadian tour by Prime Minister Stephen Harper, both houses of Parliament, and members of Canada’s 1.2 million-strong Ukrainian-Canadian community, barely registers in polls and is expected to be trounced in the first round of voting on Jan. 17.His Orange Revolution partner-turned-rival Yulia Tymoshenko, the charismatic though erratic prime minister, is running second in polls to Viktor Yanukovych, who was portrayed by the western media as a Moscow stooge when he ultimately lost that 2004 showdown.Yanukovych, the Regions Party leader, has a political resume so blemished it would spell doom in any democracy not so deeply influenced by regionalism and corruption.Yanukovych was imprisoned twice in his youth (once for a robbery, once for assault), has questionable literacy skills (his claim to be a university professor was challenged when he misspelled “professor” and made numerous other grammatical and punctuation errors on an 2004 election document), is a painfully awkward public speaker, is beholden to several oligarchs (in particular shadowy billionaire Rinat Akhmetov), and was tainted by the rigged 2004 election.Yanukovych initially won that vote, but the victory was soon nullified after fraud was detected and hundreds of thousands of protesters, wearing Yushchenko’s orange campaign scarves and hats and waving orange flags, took to the streets to successfully demand a new vote.The drama of Yushchenko’s subsequent win was heightened by the botched attempt earlier that year to kill him with poison, which left facial scars that looked like war wounds. His approval rating soon soared above 60 per cent.Today, thanks to a brutal recession, chronic infighting with Orange partner Tymoshenko, and numerous scandals, the current president is polling at around three per cent.For those enthused by political horse races, the Ukraine election has much to offer. While Yanukovych is leading in polls, many observers believe he has limited appeal outside the country’s Russian-speaking south and east.That means the populist Tymoshenko, a strong public speaker, could pull off a come-from-behind win in the second round of votes to take place Feb. 7.More sobering, however, is the sour mood of Ukrainians in a country that has long been viewed as strategically crucial in the West’s ability to contain Russian aggression.Polls indicate that roughly three-quarters of the population view politicians as self-serving and corrupt, while a November survey by Washington, D.C.-based Pew Research Center concluded that Ukrainians were among the most bitter citizens of ex-communist countries since the collapse of the old Soviet Union during the 1989-91 period.Ukrainians ranked a distant last among those surveyed on several questions relating to their appreciation of democracy and free enterprise, according to Pew survey in September of 1,000 Ukrainians, which has an error margin of four percentage points.An astonishingly low 30 per cent per cent said they approve of the change to democracy – the only one of nine countries with a score lower than 50 per cent. Just 36 per cent of Ukrainians polled approved of the move to capitalism.Ukraine’s pervasive cynicism, corruption, and petty squabbling among political leaders is disturbing for many members of the 1.2 million-strong Ukrainian-Canadian community that is one of the most influential diasporas in Canada.“The fights between them (Orange Revolution heroes Yushchenko and Tymoshenko), and in particular between the gatekeepers and insiders in both camps, is just abominable. It’s horrible, terrible,” Canada Ukraine Foundation chairman Bob Onyschuk, a Toronto lawyer, said in an interview.Marco Levytsky, publisher of the Edmonton-based Ukrainian News, said there is “considerable disillusionment” within the Canadian diaspora, which is overwhelmingly from western Ukraine, is hostile to Russia, and therefore mostly opposed to Yanukovych’s Russia-friendly political movement.“Yushchenko has been a great disappointment and Tymoshenko seems to be concerned about power for the sake of power rather than about real reform.”Both Canadians said their main concern has been recent electoral law changes, which they fear will increase the likelihood of fraud.The Canada Ukraine Foundation has pressed, so far without success, for the Harper government to fund community members to attend the presidential elections as observers.(The Canadian government, which lists Ukraine as the only European country in its top-20 list of targets for development assistance, is contributing instead to a delegation of observers from the Organization for Security and Co- operation in Europe.)While the 2004 election was often described by the western media as a battle over whether Ukraine would join the West or fall under Russia’s domination, many analysts say public concerns then and now are predominantly over incessant corruption.Transparency International ranks Ukraine as the 146th most corrupt country on the planet, in an unflattering tie with a group of countries that includes dictator Robert Mugabe’s corrupt and impoverished Zimbabwe.The ranking is particularly shocking given that the country is, according to the United Nations, the 85th most developed country in terms of measurements such as per capita income, health and education.While examples of corruption are rife, perhaps the most disheartening for Ukraine-watchers occurred the day in 2005 when Yushchenko, a former central bank president with a modest government salary, was confronted by the media with evidence that his 19-year-old son was driving around town in a $150,000 US sports car, living in an outrageously expensive apartment, and carrying a platinum-plated cellphone said to be worth $50,000 US.Yushchenko called journalists names while shooting back that the items were all gifts from his son’s wealthy friends.But the event led the public to conclude that “corruption had spread into Yushchenko’s closest circles,” wrote University of Victoria political scientist Serhy Yekelchyk in his 2007 book Ukraine: Birth of a Modern Nation.Historians say two factors have created huge barriers standing in the way of a single democratic force being able to get a political mandate to bring in sweeping economic and political reforms.The first is the country’s regional divisions that are rooted in centuries of conquest by outsiders. The Russian-speaking population in the south and east is naturally friendlier to Moscow and more hostile to Ukraine’s unsuccessful attempts, as advocated by Ukraine nationalists in the West and cheered on by the Canadian diaspora, to develop close formal and informal ties with Europe and the U.S.The second factor, which is exacerbated by the first according to British historian and author Andrew Wilson, is the way Ukraine bloodlessly established its independence from Moscow in 1991 and again in 2004.In neither case was there an actual “revolution” leaving real battle scars and prompting actual regime change, so the communist apparatchiks and their cronies in power before independence kept their clout.While Onyschuk holds out hope that Tymoshenko can win and provide an impetus for reform, Levytsky is simply hoping the country’s fragile democratic institutions aren’t irreparably wounded by election fraud.“The hope is that, despite the leaders, the civic society will eventually prevail and the leaders will have to more or less serve the people,” he said.
President Viktor Yushchenko, greeted as a hero during his 2008 Canadian tour by Prime Minister Stephen Harper, both houses of Parliament, and members of Canada’s 1.2 million-strong Ukrainian-Canadian community, barely registers in polls and is expected to be trounced in the first round of voting on Jan. 17.His Orange Revolution partner-turned-rival Yulia Tymoshenko, the charismatic though erratic prime minister, is running second in polls to Viktor Yanukovych, who was portrayed by the western media as a Moscow stooge when he ultimately lost that 2004 showdown.Yanukovych, the Regions Party leader, has a political resume so blemished it would spell doom in any democracy not so deeply influenced by regionalism and corruption.Yanukovych was imprisoned twice in his youth (once for a robbery, once for assault), has questionable literacy skills (his claim to be a university professor was challenged when he misspelled “professor” and made numerous other grammatical and punctuation errors on an 2004 election document), is a painfully awkward public speaker, is beholden to several oligarchs (in particular shadowy billionaire Rinat Akhmetov), and was tainted by the rigged 2004 election.Yanukovych initially won that vote, but the victory was soon nullified after fraud was detected and hundreds of thousands of protesters, wearing Yushchenko’s orange campaign scarves and hats and waving orange flags, took to the streets to successfully demand a new vote.The drama of Yushchenko’s subsequent win was heightened by the botched attempt earlier that year to kill him with poison, which left facial scars that looked like war wounds. His approval rating soon soared above 60 per cent.Today, thanks to a brutal recession, chronic infighting with Orange partner Tymoshenko, and numerous scandals, the current president is polling at around three per cent.For those enthused by political horse races, the Ukraine election has much to offer. While Yanukovych is leading in polls, many observers believe he has limited appeal outside the country’s Russian-speaking south and east.That means the populist Tymoshenko, a strong public speaker, could pull off a come-from-behind win in the second round of votes to take place Feb. 7.More sobering, however, is the sour mood of Ukrainians in a country that has long been viewed as strategically crucial in the West’s ability to contain Russian aggression.Polls indicate that roughly three-quarters of the population view politicians as self-serving and corrupt, while a November survey by Washington, D.C.-based Pew Research Center concluded that Ukrainians were among the most bitter citizens of ex-communist countries since the collapse of the old Soviet Union during the 1989-91 period.Ukrainians ranked a distant last among those surveyed on several questions relating to their appreciation of democracy and free enterprise, according to Pew survey in September of 1,000 Ukrainians, which has an error margin of four percentage points.An astonishingly low 30 per cent per cent said they approve of the change to democracy – the only one of nine countries with a score lower than 50 per cent. Just 36 per cent of Ukrainians polled approved of the move to capitalism.Ukraine’s pervasive cynicism, corruption, and petty squabbling among political leaders is disturbing for many members of the 1.2 million-strong Ukrainian-Canadian community that is one of the most influential diasporas in Canada.“The fights between them (Orange Revolution heroes Yushchenko and Tymoshenko), and in particular between the gatekeepers and insiders in both camps, is just abominable. It’s horrible, terrible,” Canada Ukraine Foundation chairman Bob Onyschuk, a Toronto lawyer, said in an interview.Marco Levytsky, publisher of the Edmonton-based Ukrainian News, said there is “considerable disillusionment” within the Canadian diaspora, which is overwhelmingly from western Ukraine, is hostile to Russia, and therefore mostly opposed to Yanukovych’s Russia-friendly political movement.“Yushchenko has been a great disappointment and Tymoshenko seems to be concerned about power for the sake of power rather than about real reform.”Both Canadians said their main concern has been recent electoral law changes, which they fear will increase the likelihood of fraud.The Canada Ukraine Foundation has pressed, so far without success, for the Harper government to fund community members to attend the presidential elections as observers.(The Canadian government, which lists Ukraine as the only European country in its top-20 list of targets for development assistance, is contributing instead to a delegation of observers from the Organization for Security and Co- operation in Europe.)While the 2004 election was often described by the western media as a battle over whether Ukraine would join the West or fall under Russia’s domination, many analysts say public concerns then and now are predominantly over incessant corruption.Transparency International ranks Ukraine as the 146th most corrupt country on the planet, in an unflattering tie with a group of countries that includes dictator Robert Mugabe’s corrupt and impoverished Zimbabwe.The ranking is particularly shocking given that the country is, according to the United Nations, the 85th most developed country in terms of measurements such as per capita income, health and education.While examples of corruption are rife, perhaps the most disheartening for Ukraine-watchers occurred the day in 2005 when Yushchenko, a former central bank president with a modest government salary, was confronted by the media with evidence that his 19-year-old son was driving around town in a $150,000 US sports car, living in an outrageously expensive apartment, and carrying a platinum-plated cellphone said to be worth $50,000 US.Yushchenko called journalists names while shooting back that the items were all gifts from his son’s wealthy friends.But the event led the public to conclude that “corruption had spread into Yushchenko’s closest circles,” wrote University of Victoria political scientist Serhy Yekelchyk in his 2007 book Ukraine: Birth of a Modern Nation.Historians say two factors have created huge barriers standing in the way of a single democratic force being able to get a political mandate to bring in sweeping economic and political reforms.The first is the country’s regional divisions that are rooted in centuries of conquest by outsiders. The Russian-speaking population in the south and east is naturally friendlier to Moscow and more hostile to Ukraine’s unsuccessful attempts, as advocated by Ukraine nationalists in the West and cheered on by the Canadian diaspora, to develop close formal and informal ties with Europe and the U.S.The second factor, which is exacerbated by the first according to British historian and author Andrew Wilson, is the way Ukraine bloodlessly established its independence from Moscow in 1991 and again in 2004.In neither case was there an actual “revolution” leaving real battle scars and prompting actual regime change, so the communist apparatchiks and their cronies in power before independence kept their clout.While Onyschuk holds out hope that Tymoshenko can win and provide an impetus for reform, Levytsky is simply hoping the country’s fragile democratic institutions aren’t irreparably wounded by election fraud.“The hope is that, despite the leaders, the civic society will eventually prevail and the leaders will have to more or less serve the people,” he said.
Putin Accuses Ukraine Of 'Abuse' On Oil Transit Deal
MOSCOW, Russia -- Prime Minister Vladimir Putin accused Ukraine Tuesday of "abuse" of Russian oil transits via its territory but predicted both sides would abide by contractual obligations to keep supply flowing to Europe.
"We are ready to deliver (oil), we have a contract, but if any of the transit countries abuse, what can you do?" Putin was quoted by Russian news agencies as saying."We have a contract to deliver oil. I think that this contract will be fulfilled," he added.His comments came after Ukraine said Monday it wanted to change the terms of its 2004 transit contract with Russia for oil shipments via Ukrainian territory to the European Union.Earlier on Tuesday, Russia's Deputy Prime Minister Igor Sechin said Russian oil shipments to Europe through Ukraine will continue without disruption as the two countries renegotiate their transit agreement."We expect that there will be no problems with the transit," Sechin was quoted as saying by the RIA Novosti news agency.Ukraine had sought and obtained an increase in the tariffs Russia pays to transit its oil through Ukrainian pipelines, but the two sides had still not agreed on how much oil -- subject to those tariffs -- Russia would "guarantee" to pump through Ukraine, officials said.Sechin said Russia was still negotiating with Ukraine on the final terms of the new deal.Disputes between Russia and Ukraine on pricing and transit of Russian natural gas shipped to EU clients have caused serious supply disruptions in recent years, but Ukrainian officials gave assurances that transit would continue even if talks were not concluded by the end of the year.EU sources in Brussels also played down fears of another looming energy dispute between Russia and Ukraine that could have an impact on EU energy supplies.
"We are ready to deliver (oil), we have a contract, but if any of the transit countries abuse, what can you do?" Putin was quoted by Russian news agencies as saying."We have a contract to deliver oil. I think that this contract will be fulfilled," he added.His comments came after Ukraine said Monday it wanted to change the terms of its 2004 transit contract with Russia for oil shipments via Ukrainian territory to the European Union.Earlier on Tuesday, Russia's Deputy Prime Minister Igor Sechin said Russian oil shipments to Europe through Ukraine will continue without disruption as the two countries renegotiate their transit agreement."We expect that there will be no problems with the transit," Sechin was quoted as saying by the RIA Novosti news agency.Ukraine had sought and obtained an increase in the tariffs Russia pays to transit its oil through Ukrainian pipelines, but the two sides had still not agreed on how much oil -- subject to those tariffs -- Russia would "guarantee" to pump through Ukraine, officials said.Sechin said Russia was still negotiating with Ukraine on the final terms of the new deal.Disputes between Russia and Ukraine on pricing and transit of Russian natural gas shipped to EU clients have caused serious supply disruptions in recent years, but Ukrainian officials gave assurances that transit would continue even if talks were not concluded by the end of the year.EU sources in Brussels also played down fears of another looming energy dispute between Russia and Ukraine that could have an impact on EU energy supplies.
Russia to develop new nuclear missiles and launchers
Russia will continue developing new nuclear missiles and launchers despite disarmament talks with the US, Russia's President Dmitry Medvedev says.
"Of course, we will develop new systems, including delivery platforms, or missiles. This is routine practice, the entire world is doing it," he said.
Speaking in a live TV interview, Mr Medvedev said this would not bypass agreements with the US.
Russia says it successfully tested a long-range SS-18 missile on Thursday.
The missile - called an RS-20 Voyevoda in Russia - was fired from Orenburg in central Russia and hit targets in Kamchatka, in the far east, the Ria Novosti news agency reported.
New treaty plan
So far Russia and the US have failed to find a successor to the Cold War-era Start 1 treaty. That treaty, which led to deep cuts in nuclear arsenals on both sides, expired on 5 December.
Asked why there had been a delay, Mr Medvedev said "this is a difficult question, a very difficult one".
"This is a treaty which determines the parameters for developing and reducing the strategic arms potential of two of the biggest nuclear states. We are moving very quickly as it is. We have agreed on almost everything."
Both sides have agreed to continue observing Start 1 - which was signed by Mikhail Gorbachev and George Bush Senior in the final days of the Soviet Union - until they reach a new agreement.
Under a joint understanding signed in July, deployed nuclear warheads should be cut to below 1,700 on each side within seven years of a new treaty .
"Of course, we will develop new systems, including delivery platforms, or missiles. This is routine practice, the entire world is doing it," he said.
Speaking in a live TV interview, Mr Medvedev said this would not bypass agreements with the US.
Russia says it successfully tested a long-range SS-18 missile on Thursday.
The missile - called an RS-20 Voyevoda in Russia - was fired from Orenburg in central Russia and hit targets in Kamchatka, in the far east, the Ria Novosti news agency reported.
New treaty plan
So far Russia and the US have failed to find a successor to the Cold War-era Start 1 treaty. That treaty, which led to deep cuts in nuclear arsenals on both sides, expired on 5 December.
Asked why there had been a delay, Mr Medvedev said "this is a difficult question, a very difficult one".
"This is a treaty which determines the parameters for developing and reducing the strategic arms potential of two of the biggest nuclear states. We are moving very quickly as it is. We have agreed on almost everything."
Both sides have agreed to continue observing Start 1 - which was signed by Mikhail Gorbachev and George Bush Senior in the final days of the Soviet Union - until they reach a new agreement.
Under a joint understanding signed in July, deployed nuclear warheads should be cut to below 1,700 on each side within seven years of a new treaty .
Putin: Russia must counter US missile defences
Russia needs "to develop offensive weapons systems" to counter US missile defences and maintain the strategic balance, PM Vladimir Putin says.
Otherwise, the United States would feel "completely protected" and able to "do whatever they want".
The US this year dropped controversial plans for missile defence bases in the Czech Republic and Poland, but said it would develop other defensive systems.
Mr Putin said such plans were hindering nuclear arms reduction talks.
Russia and the US are yet to find a successor to the Cold War-era Start I treaty, which expired on 5 December.
The 1991 treaty led to deep cuts in nuclear arsenals on both sides.
Both sides have agreed to continue observing Start I until they reach a new agreement.
Under a joint understanding signed in July, deployed nuclear warheads should be cut to below 1,700 on each side within seven years of a new treaty - a huge cut on Soviet-era levels.
Nonetheless, between them the two countries will retain enough firepower to destroy the world several times over.
"To preserve the balance, we must develop offensive weapons systems, not missile defence systems as the US is doing," Mr Putin said during a visit to Russia's Far East.
"The problems of missile defence and offensive arms are very closely linked.
"By building such an umbrella over themselves our [US] partners could feel themselves fully secure and will do whatever they want, which upsets the balance," the Russian premier added.
Mr Putin did not say what kind of offensive weapons Russia was seeking to develop.
Earlier this month, President Dmitry Medvedev said Russia would continue to develop new nuclear missiles and launchers despite the disarmament talks, describing this as "routine practice".
In September, Mr Putin described as "correct and brave" a decision by US President Barack Obama to shelve controversial missile defence bases in Poland and the Czech Republic.
Mr Obama did, however, say Washington would develop new ballistic missile defences elsewhere, including a sea-based system.
He said the US still needed a programme to defend the US against missiles from "rogue states" like Iran.
Moscow had long objected to plans by the administration of former-President George W Bush to base a missile interceptor system close to its borders, calling it a threat to its security.
Otherwise, the United States would feel "completely protected" and able to "do whatever they want".
The US this year dropped controversial plans for missile defence bases in the Czech Republic and Poland, but said it would develop other defensive systems.
Mr Putin said such plans were hindering nuclear arms reduction talks.
Russia and the US are yet to find a successor to the Cold War-era Start I treaty, which expired on 5 December.
The 1991 treaty led to deep cuts in nuclear arsenals on both sides.
Both sides have agreed to continue observing Start I until they reach a new agreement.
Under a joint understanding signed in July, deployed nuclear warheads should be cut to below 1,700 on each side within seven years of a new treaty - a huge cut on Soviet-era levels.
Nonetheless, between them the two countries will retain enough firepower to destroy the world several times over.
"To preserve the balance, we must develop offensive weapons systems, not missile defence systems as the US is doing," Mr Putin said during a visit to Russia's Far East.
"The problems of missile defence and offensive arms are very closely linked.
"By building such an umbrella over themselves our [US] partners could feel themselves fully secure and will do whatever they want, which upsets the balance," the Russian premier added.
Mr Putin did not say what kind of offensive weapons Russia was seeking to develop.
Earlier this month, President Dmitry Medvedev said Russia would continue to develop new nuclear missiles and launchers despite the disarmament talks, describing this as "routine practice".
In September, Mr Putin described as "correct and brave" a decision by US President Barack Obama to shelve controversial missile defence bases in Poland and the Czech Republic.
Mr Obama did, however, say Washington would develop new ballistic missile defences elsewhere, including a sea-based system.
He said the US still needed a programme to defend the US against missiles from "rogue states" like Iran.
Moscow had long objected to plans by the administration of former-President George W Bush to base a missile interceptor system close to its borders, calling it a threat to its security.
Sunday 27 December 2009
Aeroflot Shares Increase 9% on Cost Cutting
Shares in Aeroflot, the biggest airline in Eastern Europe, jumped the most in almost 11 months on Wednesday after the state carrier cut costs more than analysts expected and forecast a 25 percent gain in passenger traffic next year.
Aeroflot shares rose 9.1 percent to 52.37 rubles at the close in Moscow trading, the biggest gain since Jan. 26. The shares closed at their highest value since Nov. 17, 2008.
Aeroflot said late Tuesday that it slashed operating costs 34 percent to $2.16 billion in the first nine months of the year. That helped the company increase net income 21 percent to $170.4 million, even as revenue declined 31 percent to $2.46 billion.
“Aeroflot continued to demonstrate strong operating performance after the end of the high season,” VTB Capital analysts led by Yelena Sakhanova wrote in a research note Wednesday. The growth in profitability on weaker revenue “points to a market recovery and provides sound optimism to management,” VTB added.
Fuel expenses, the biggest cost item, declined 59 percent in January through September, helped by lower prices and a switch to a bidding system for suppliers. Payroll costs declined 24 percent as Aeroflot cut 4 percent of its staff.
Aeroflot expects to increase passenger traffic 25 percent next year versus this year and raise the ratio of filled seats per flight to 72 percent from about 69 percent now.
“The reported results and the company outlook will be a trigger for the stock,” said Andrei Rozhkov, an analyst at Metropol.
Patriarch Kirill Speaks Up for Gays
Russian Orthodox Patriarch Kirill said Wednesday that although the church views homosexuality as a sin, gays should not face discrimination.
Kirill said “those who sin” must not be punished and therefore the church opposes any discrimination. Same-sex unions, however, should not be considered equal to heterosexual marriages, he said.
“We accept all the choices a person makes — in terms of their sexuality as well,” the patriarch said, RIA-Novosti reported.
Gay rights advocates argue that homosexuality is not wrong because it is an in-born orientation, but the church insists that it is a choice.
It was unclear to what extent the patriarch was easing church dogma in his carefully chosen statements, made during a meeting with visiting Council of Europe Secretary-General Thorbjorn Jagland.
Opposition to gay rights remains widespread in Russia, where homosexuality was decriminalized only in 1993.
Several high-profile Russian politicians have spoken against gay rights. Moscow Mayor Yury Luzhkov once described gays as “sodomites” and has blamed them for spreading AIDS.
Kirill, who was elected patriarch in January, has been seen as a modernizer and a politically savvy figure, but so far he has made no major statements that would signal a shift in the church’s conservative views on homosexuality and abortion.
Inflation Poses Risk To Renewed Growth
The economy will probably contract 8.7 percent this year, and the nascent recovery still faces risks, particularly faster inflation, Finance Minister Alexei Kudrin said Wednesday.
“We have to achieve a lower level of inflation and low interest rates, keeping bank deposits safe for consumers,” Kudrin told reporters. “It’s the basis for future investments.” Inflation will not exceed 7.5 percent in 2010, he said.
The State Statistics Service said Wednesday that the inflation rate advanced 0.2 percent, the biggest weekly increase since July, in the seven days through Monday as food costs increased. That brought inflation rate for the year to date to 8.8 percent, the service said.
The Economic Development Ministry said Tuesday that inflation would likely reach 8.8 percent to 9 percent this year and slow to between 6.5 percent and 7.5 percent in 2010, down from 9 percent to 10 percent.
“Having won at the first stage of fighting the crisis, we should not relax and should be ready for a second stage. … The second year will be difficult in its own way,” Kudrin said. “Uncertainty is very high, demand and investment remain very low. … There remains a risk of letting inflation go.”
Output in Russia has picked up as prices for commodities gained on improved prospects for a global recovery and bank lending stabilized. The Central Bank has cut the refinancing rate to a record-low 9 percent to help spur lending and curtail a contraction that saw the economy slump a record 10.9 percent in the second quarter.
The economic decline eased in the third quarter, when output fell an annual 8.9 percent. Gross domestic product will continue growing this quarter after increasing during the previous three months, Kudrin said.
Russia may post a net capital outflow in the fourth quarter, Kudrin said. The government boosted budget spending by 27 percent this year compared with 2008, and expenditure will remain at the same level next year, he said.
A stronger ruble and high profit margins available on Russian markets continue to lure speculative capital, the finance minister said.
Kudrin said “hot money” flows played a negative role during the crisis and that Russia might start capping foreign borrowing by state-run companies. It will not, however, revise its plan to sell about $18 billion in debt next year, even after the price of oil rose.
The debt sale is “necessary to gradually shift to a market means of plugging the deficit, which is used by all countries,” Kudrin told reporters. The government has approved borrowing of as much as $17.8 billion on international markets next year in the country’s first bond sale since its 1998 default on $40 billion.
Russia’s return to the sovereign debt market will also allow the country to create a benchmark that can function as a “reference point” for other borrowers, including private companies, Kudrin said.
This year’s 74 percent rise in Urals crude has prompted other policymakers to suggest that the government may need to sell less debt to plug its deficit.
Next year’s deficit will be equivalent to about 6.2 percent to 6.5 percent of gross domestic product, Klepach said, compared with a Finance Ministry estimate of 6.8 percent. The government, which is running its first deficit in a decade, expects the gap will reach 6.9 percent this year.
Standard & Poor’s raised the outlook on Russia’s BBB credit grade to stable from negative on Monday. The move is being taken as “high praise” for the government’s plans to reduce the deficit, Kudrin said. “It also means that Russia will have a good opportunity to borrow on international markets.”
He also said the country’s Reserve Fund would hold 1.8 trillion rubles ($59 billion) at the start of next year, while the National Welfare Fund would be at 2.8 trillion rubles.
“We have to achieve a lower level of inflation and low interest rates, keeping bank deposits safe for consumers,” Kudrin told reporters. “It’s the basis for future investments.” Inflation will not exceed 7.5 percent in 2010, he said.
The State Statistics Service said Wednesday that the inflation rate advanced 0.2 percent, the biggest weekly increase since July, in the seven days through Monday as food costs increased. That brought inflation rate for the year to date to 8.8 percent, the service said.
The Economic Development Ministry said Tuesday that inflation would likely reach 8.8 percent to 9 percent this year and slow to between 6.5 percent and 7.5 percent in 2010, down from 9 percent to 10 percent.
“Having won at the first stage of fighting the crisis, we should not relax and should be ready for a second stage. … The second year will be difficult in its own way,” Kudrin said. “Uncertainty is very high, demand and investment remain very low. … There remains a risk of letting inflation go.”
Output in Russia has picked up as prices for commodities gained on improved prospects for a global recovery and bank lending stabilized. The Central Bank has cut the refinancing rate to a record-low 9 percent to help spur lending and curtail a contraction that saw the economy slump a record 10.9 percent in the second quarter.
The economic decline eased in the third quarter, when output fell an annual 8.9 percent. Gross domestic product will continue growing this quarter after increasing during the previous three months, Kudrin said.
Russia may post a net capital outflow in the fourth quarter, Kudrin said. The government boosted budget spending by 27 percent this year compared with 2008, and expenditure will remain at the same level next year, he said.
A stronger ruble and high profit margins available on Russian markets continue to lure speculative capital, the finance minister said.
Kudrin said “hot money” flows played a negative role during the crisis and that Russia might start capping foreign borrowing by state-run companies. It will not, however, revise its plan to sell about $18 billion in debt next year, even after the price of oil rose.
The debt sale is “necessary to gradually shift to a market means of plugging the deficit, which is used by all countries,” Kudrin told reporters. The government has approved borrowing of as much as $17.8 billion on international markets next year in the country’s first bond sale since its 1998 default on $40 billion.
Russia’s return to the sovereign debt market will also allow the country to create a benchmark that can function as a “reference point” for other borrowers, including private companies, Kudrin said.
This year’s 74 percent rise in Urals crude has prompted other policymakers to suggest that the government may need to sell less debt to plug its deficit.
Next year’s deficit will be equivalent to about 6.2 percent to 6.5 percent of gross domestic product, Klepach said, compared with a Finance Ministry estimate of 6.8 percent. The government, which is running its first deficit in a decade, expects the gap will reach 6.9 percent this year.
Standard & Poor’s raised the outlook on Russia’s BBB credit grade to stable from negative on Monday. The move is being taken as “high praise” for the government’s plans to reduce the deficit, Kudrin said. “It also means that Russia will have a good opportunity to borrow on international markets.”
He also said the country’s Reserve Fund would hold 1.8 trillion rubles ($59 billion) at the start of next year, while the National Welfare Fund would be at 2.8 trillion rubles.
Rostropovich Fest Brings Best of Classical to Baku
Azerbaijan’s capital, Baku, played host to the third in a series of annual music festivals earlier this month honoring one of the city’s most distinguished native sons, cellist and conductor Mstislav Rostropovich.
Rostropovich was born to a musical family in Baku on March 27, 1927, his father, Leopold, a renowned cellist and professor at the Baku Conservatory, his mother, Sofia, a talented pianist.
“My father lived in Baku only until he was four, but he always loved the city,” daughter Olga Rostropovich, director of the festival and president of the Mstislav Rostropovich Foundation, said during a conversation just prior to the festival’s closing concert. “He came to Baku to conduct,” she continued, “and was forever trying to improve the musical situation, making it his business to see that the orchestra here was provided with better instruments and received better salaries. He also wished to create a festival the likes of which Baku had never seen before.”
Rostropovich fulfilled his wish a little more than a year before his death in April 2007 by bringing an impressive array of fellow musicians to Baku for a week of concerts commemorating the 100th anniversary of the birth of his close friend and mentor, Dmitry Shostakovich.
Present-day Baku, is a handsome, bustling, oil-rich metropolis of just above 2 million inhabitants, boasting an array of luxury boutiques that easily rival Moscow’s and clubs that are alleged to rank the city among the world’s 10 leading centers of nightlife.
When it comes to classical music, however, Baku lies off the beaten track of touring soloists and ensembles. It took considerable effort, therefore, plus strong support from the Azeri government and the foundation bearing the name of the country’s first president, Heydar Aliyev, to bring to the city an assembly of musical talent from around the globe as extraordinary as that which appeared at this year’s Rostropovich festival. For the most part, the performances that resulted were of a quality to make even a jaded Moscow concert-goer sit up and take notice.
The festival’s opening concert, however, relied for its music not on imported talent but on Baku’s own Azerbaijan State Symphony Orchestra, which played quite superbly under the baton of its long-time music director, Rauf Abdullayev. Featured on the brief program was a fascinating array of works by half a dozen Azeri composers, all of which seemed in some degree to spring from Azerbaijan’s rich store of folk music.
Following intermission on opening night came a very special tribute to Rostropovich, with the showing of an hour-long film from U.S. television network CBS documenting his return to the Soviet Union in 1990, together with his equally famous soprano wife, Galina Vishnevskaya, following the couple’s 16-year-long enforced exile abroad. Besides marking each step of the joyous weeklong homecoming, the film also captured the extraordinary spirit of the time, when everything seemed possible, including, most of all, that the Soviet Union might transform itself into a very different sort of country.
The soloist on the festival’s second evening was Lithuanian-born cellist David Geringas, a prize pupil of Rostropovich and winner of a gold medal at the 1970 Tchaikovsky Competition, who managed to bring clarity to the knotty solo passages of Shostakovich’s Cello Concert No. 1, of a sort perhaps heard only in the remembered performances of his great mentor.
On the evening that followed, young Azeri native Murad Adigezalzadeh provided truly virtuoso pianism in Sergei Prokofiev’s Piano Concert No. 2, and was splendidly accompanied by Moscow’s Novaya Rossia Orchestra, under the baton of Romanian conductor Christian Badea, who went on to lead the first-ever performance of Shostakovich’s Symphony No. 10 that, in my experience, actually generated excitement.
On stage for the next two festival evenings was London’s superb English Chamber Orchestra, first with famed Israeli-born violinist Pinchas Zukerman as conductor and soloist in some stylishly played music of Joseph Haydn and Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart, and then (in a concert that brief illness forced me to miss) under the baton of its principal conductor, Paul Watkins.
The festival’s final concert proved unexpectedly exciting. Leading the Azerbaijan State Symphony in the music of Ludwig van Beethoven was Maxim Vengerov, known far and wide as a supreme virtuoso of the violin but in recent seasons turning to the podium as the result of a shoulder problem. It is good to know that the problem has now been overcome and Vengerov will soon be playing again. But considering how incisively he dispatched Beethoven’s Egmont Overture, Triple Concerto — with three excellent young soloists, including Taiwanese-Australian violinist Ray Chen, who last summer took first prize in the hugely prestigious Queen Elizabeth of Belgium Competition — and Symphony No. 5, Vengerov seems likely before long to be pursuing as acclaimed a conducting career as the one that he has already forged at the violin.
Rostropovich was born to a musical family in Baku on March 27, 1927, his father, Leopold, a renowned cellist and professor at the Baku Conservatory, his mother, Sofia, a talented pianist.
“My father lived in Baku only until he was four, but he always loved the city,” daughter Olga Rostropovich, director of the festival and president of the Mstislav Rostropovich Foundation, said during a conversation just prior to the festival’s closing concert. “He came to Baku to conduct,” she continued, “and was forever trying to improve the musical situation, making it his business to see that the orchestra here was provided with better instruments and received better salaries. He also wished to create a festival the likes of which Baku had never seen before.”
Rostropovich fulfilled his wish a little more than a year before his death in April 2007 by bringing an impressive array of fellow musicians to Baku for a week of concerts commemorating the 100th anniversary of the birth of his close friend and mentor, Dmitry Shostakovich.
Present-day Baku, is a handsome, bustling, oil-rich metropolis of just above 2 million inhabitants, boasting an array of luxury boutiques that easily rival Moscow’s and clubs that are alleged to rank the city among the world’s 10 leading centers of nightlife.
When it comes to classical music, however, Baku lies off the beaten track of touring soloists and ensembles. It took considerable effort, therefore, plus strong support from the Azeri government and the foundation bearing the name of the country’s first president, Heydar Aliyev, to bring to the city an assembly of musical talent from around the globe as extraordinary as that which appeared at this year’s Rostropovich festival. For the most part, the performances that resulted were of a quality to make even a jaded Moscow concert-goer sit up and take notice.
The festival’s opening concert, however, relied for its music not on imported talent but on Baku’s own Azerbaijan State Symphony Orchestra, which played quite superbly under the baton of its long-time music director, Rauf Abdullayev. Featured on the brief program was a fascinating array of works by half a dozen Azeri composers, all of which seemed in some degree to spring from Azerbaijan’s rich store of folk music.
Following intermission on opening night came a very special tribute to Rostropovich, with the showing of an hour-long film from U.S. television network CBS documenting his return to the Soviet Union in 1990, together with his equally famous soprano wife, Galina Vishnevskaya, following the couple’s 16-year-long enforced exile abroad. Besides marking each step of the joyous weeklong homecoming, the film also captured the extraordinary spirit of the time, when everything seemed possible, including, most of all, that the Soviet Union might transform itself into a very different sort of country.
The soloist on the festival’s second evening was Lithuanian-born cellist David Geringas, a prize pupil of Rostropovich and winner of a gold medal at the 1970 Tchaikovsky Competition, who managed to bring clarity to the knotty solo passages of Shostakovich’s Cello Concert No. 1, of a sort perhaps heard only in the remembered performances of his great mentor.
On the evening that followed, young Azeri native Murad Adigezalzadeh provided truly virtuoso pianism in Sergei Prokofiev’s Piano Concert No. 2, and was splendidly accompanied by Moscow’s Novaya Rossia Orchestra, under the baton of Romanian conductor Christian Badea, who went on to lead the first-ever performance of Shostakovich’s Symphony No. 10 that, in my experience, actually generated excitement.
On stage for the next two festival evenings was London’s superb English Chamber Orchestra, first with famed Israeli-born violinist Pinchas Zukerman as conductor and soloist in some stylishly played music of Joseph Haydn and Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart, and then (in a concert that brief illness forced me to miss) under the baton of its principal conductor, Paul Watkins.
The festival’s final concert proved unexpectedly exciting. Leading the Azerbaijan State Symphony in the music of Ludwig van Beethoven was Maxim Vengerov, known far and wide as a supreme virtuoso of the violin but in recent seasons turning to the podium as the result of a shoulder problem. It is good to know that the problem has now been overcome and Vengerov will soon be playing again. But considering how incisively he dispatched Beethoven’s Egmont Overture, Triple Concerto — with three excellent young soloists, including Taiwanese-Australian violinist Ray Chen, who last summer took first prize in the hugely prestigious Queen Elizabeth of Belgium Competition — and Symphony No. 5, Vengerov seems likely before long to be pursuing as acclaimed a conducting career as the one that he has already forged at the violin.
Plans to Rebuild War Memorial Gain Steam
Mayor Yury Luzhkov proposed placing a replica of a 46-meter-tall war monument razed in Georgia on Poklonnaya Gora in western Moscow on Wednesday as a suggestion by Prime Minister Vladimir Putin to build the replica gathered steam.
State Duma Speaker Boris Gryzlov said United Russia was ready to raise funds for the World War II monument and part of it could be built by the Victory Day holiday on May 9.
Luzhkov, Putin and Gryzlov spoke after meeting with Zurab Nogaideli, a former Georgian prime minister-turned-opposition politician who promised to rebuild the monument in Georgia’s second-largest city, Kutaisi, if his party assumed power.
Georgian President Mikheil Saakashvili’s government ordered the monument commemorating the Soviet Army’s victory in World War II to be demolished to make room for the construction of a new national parliament building. The monument was leveled last Friday, and flying debris struck and killed a mother and her 8-year-old daughter in a nearby courtyard.
Putin, who first proposed a replica Tuesday, said Wednesday that the demolition of the monument showed that Saakashvili’s government was continuing “its policies directed against the people.”
Because of those policies, he said, official relations between Moscow and Tbilisi have reached “the lowest point in history.”
Gryzlov, who leads United Russia’s supreme council, said the monument was the last straw for his “patience with Saakashvili’s regime,” according to a statement on the party’s web site.
Putin, who heads United Russia, said rebuilding the monument in Moscow could actually improve ties below the government level. “The relationship between our people … has a solid, centuries-old foundation, and we are linked by thousands of invisible bonds of common interest and history,” he said.
Gryzlov said United Russia would collect money for the reconstruction.
Luzhkov, a founding member of United Russia, said the monument would be rebuilt with donors’ funds and the best location would be Poklonnaya Gora, Interfax reported. The area west of the city center contains a World War II museum and Victory Park.
Nogaideli, who heads the For a Fair Georgia party, vowed to do everything possible to re-erect the monument in his home country.
“Our main task is to re-erect the monument in Kutaisi. We will definitely do this when we get to power,” he said, RIA-Novosti reported.
The Georgian opposition has questioned the rationale behind the destruction. Dato Zurabishvili, a leader of the Republican party, said Saakashvili had disliked the concrete and bronze monument, built by Georgian artist Merab Berdzenishvili in the 1980s, and probably had ordered it destroyed on a whim. “He is like an Arab sheikh. If he dislikes something, he just gives it the thumbs down,” he told The Moscow Times.
But Giorgi Kandelaki, deputy head of the Georgian parliament’s International Affairs Committee and a close ally of Saakashvili, said Russia was “creating a hysteria aimed at the recreation of a dominant empire.”
He said the monument had blocked the construction of the new parliament building and grieved Georgians because it glorified the Soviet Army.
“The parliament will move in 2012, and the chosen area left no choice but to do away with the monument,” he said by telephone from Tbilisi.
Tbilisi has little tolerance for monuments that glorify the Soviet Union, Kandelaki said. “While we do respect Georgian veterans who fought in the war, we do not respect the Soviet Army,” he said.
He added that Tbilisi would not destroy random war monuments, many of which commemorate fallen soldiers and not the Soviet Army. “We are not monument vandals,” he said.
Priest Shot Dead for Berating 3 Drunks
An Orthodox priest who scolded a trio of drunken men for urinating in the hallway outside his apartment was shot dead by one of them in the Moscow region city of Podolsk, marking the second slaying of a priest in recent weeks.
Oleg Shekhov, a 38-year-old Podolsk resident previously convicted in a separate murder, admitted in televised comments to shooting the priest, Alexander Filipov, 39, with an air pistol modified to fire regular bullets late Tuesday.
“It was a mistake,” Shekhov, a thin man wearing a green jacket and a black baseball cap, said after investigators brought him in handcuffs to the crime scene Wednesday. “Nothing was premeditated.”
Investigators said Filipov had tried to stop Shekhov and two friends from urinating in the entryway of the apartment building where he lived with his family on the ground floor.
Shekhov was detained hours after he shot Filipov, even though he tried to send investigators on a false trail by collecting bullet casings from the crime scene and planting them and the air pistol in the car of a friend, Investigative Committee spokesman Vladimir Markin.
“Filipov wanted to reprimand a group of three drunken men who were behaving badly near his apartment building, and one of them shot him,” Markin said on NTV television.
Two other suspects have been detained. Investigators did not release their names.
If charged and convicted of murder, Shekhov could face up to life in prison.
A police search of Shekhov’s apartment turned up a hunting rifle, a knife and a taser, the Investigative Committee said in a statement.
Television footage showed flowers lying on the stairs inside the shabby apartment block where the priest had lived with his wife and three children. Filipov, the head of a local church that he had rebuilt from scratch in the early 1990s, was a popular figure in Podolsk, local residents said.
“He was a very kind and very responsive man who always was ready to help,” said Lidia Boldyreva, a teacher at a school in the neighborhood where Filipov lived.
Russian Orthodox Church spokesman Vladimir Legoida called Filipov an “outstanding man” on NTV.
Russian Orthodox Patriarch Kirill opened a meeting of top Orthodox priests with a prayer for Filipov. More than 1,000 priests stood during the prayer, Interfax reported.
Last month, another Orthodox priest,Danil Sysoyev, who led a parish in southern Moscow, was gunned down in his church by an unidentified attacker. Sysoyev was a well-known critic of Islam and neo-paganism and had received many threats in recent years.
Oleg Shekhov, a 38-year-old Podolsk resident previously convicted in a separate murder, admitted in televised comments to shooting the priest, Alexander Filipov, 39, with an air pistol modified to fire regular bullets late Tuesday.
“It was a mistake,” Shekhov, a thin man wearing a green jacket and a black baseball cap, said after investigators brought him in handcuffs to the crime scene Wednesday. “Nothing was premeditated.”
Investigators said Filipov had tried to stop Shekhov and two friends from urinating in the entryway of the apartment building where he lived with his family on the ground floor.
Shekhov was detained hours after he shot Filipov, even though he tried to send investigators on a false trail by collecting bullet casings from the crime scene and planting them and the air pistol in the car of a friend, Investigative Committee spokesman Vladimir Markin.
“Filipov wanted to reprimand a group of three drunken men who were behaving badly near his apartment building, and one of them shot him,” Markin said on NTV television.
Two other suspects have been detained. Investigators did not release their names.
If charged and convicted of murder, Shekhov could face up to life in prison.
A police search of Shekhov’s apartment turned up a hunting rifle, a knife and a taser, the Investigative Committee said in a statement.
Television footage showed flowers lying on the stairs inside the shabby apartment block where the priest had lived with his wife and three children. Filipov, the head of a local church that he had rebuilt from scratch in the early 1990s, was a popular figure in Podolsk, local residents said.
“He was a very kind and very responsive man who always was ready to help,” said Lidia Boldyreva, a teacher at a school in the neighborhood where Filipov lived.
Russian Orthodox Church spokesman Vladimir Legoida called Filipov an “outstanding man” on NTV.
Russian Orthodox Patriarch Kirill opened a meeting of top Orthodox priests with a prayer for Filipov. More than 1,000 priests stood during the prayer, Interfax reported.
Last month, another Orthodox priest,Danil Sysoyev, who led a parish in southern Moscow, was gunned down in his church by an unidentified attacker. Sysoyev was a well-known critic of Islam and neo-paganism and had received many threats in recent years.
Medvedev Reminds Kudrin to Be Polite
President Dmitry Medvedev had to remind Finance Minister Alexei Kudrin to mind his manners Wednesday after a testy debate about a national payments system with Vneshekonombank chief Vladimir Dmitriyev.
Dmitriyev said a law was needed to create a national payment system that would be operated by a noncommercial entity and could include some 80 percent of Russian banks. Currently, several regional systems are operated by commercial banks, primarily state retail giant Sberbank, and these are not enough, he said.
“The idea is that [banks] could work through the operator with the public and cooperate with state bodies,” Dmitriyev told a meeting of the State Council, Interfax reported.
He said the system could be created within a year after the law was passed.
VEB is “ready to become the platform,” he said. Otherwise, a planned postal bank based on bailed-out Svyaz Bank and Russian Post could serve as the operator.
Kudrin, who also holds the rank of deputy prime minister, lashed out at Dmitriyev’s “inaccurate” comments.
“Dmitriyev, in his speech, gave a contentious, I’d even say conceptually inaccurate, approach to a national payments system,” Kudrin said, Interfax reported. “He’s confusing a powerful domestic system for handling accounts … with a national payment system.”
Kudrin said a bill to create a national payment system was being prepared by a working group, including representatives from the Finance and Economic Development ministries, the Central Bank and the banking industry.
But “the government hasn’t discussed this proposal by VEB, and these proposals came as something of a surprise for me today,” Kudrin said.
Medvedev said there would be time to discuss the payment system, which he proposed would complement his plan to make more government services available electronically.
“And there’s a second thing,” Medvedev said. “It’s small, but important. In our country, it’s historically accepted that when speaking about people who are present, we address them by name and patronymic, not in the third person.”
Turning to Kudrin, he added: “Alexei Leonidovich, I’d ask you not to forget that.”
Kudrin apologized to Medvedev, who responded that he was not the one who should be asked for forgiveness.
Dmitriyev said a law was needed to create a national payment system that would be operated by a noncommercial entity and could include some 80 percent of Russian banks. Currently, several regional systems are operated by commercial banks, primarily state retail giant Sberbank, and these are not enough, he said.
“The idea is that [banks] could work through the operator with the public and cooperate with state bodies,” Dmitriyev told a meeting of the State Council, Interfax reported.
He said the system could be created within a year after the law was passed.
VEB is “ready to become the platform,” he said. Otherwise, a planned postal bank based on bailed-out Svyaz Bank and Russian Post could serve as the operator.
Kudrin, who also holds the rank of deputy prime minister, lashed out at Dmitriyev’s “inaccurate” comments.
“Dmitriyev, in his speech, gave a contentious, I’d even say conceptually inaccurate, approach to a national payments system,” Kudrin said, Interfax reported. “He’s confusing a powerful domestic system for handling accounts … with a national payment system.”
Kudrin said a bill to create a national payment system was being prepared by a working group, including representatives from the Finance and Economic Development ministries, the Central Bank and the banking industry.
But “the government hasn’t discussed this proposal by VEB, and these proposals came as something of a surprise for me today,” Kudrin said.
Medvedev said there would be time to discuss the payment system, which he proposed would complement his plan to make more government services available electronically.
“And there’s a second thing,” Medvedev said. “It’s small, but important. In our country, it’s historically accepted that when speaking about people who are present, we address them by name and patronymic, not in the third person.”
Turning to Kudrin, he added: “Alexei Leonidovich, I’d ask you not to forget that.”
Kudrin apologized to Medvedev, who responded that he was not the one who should be asked for forgiveness.
Holiday Shoppers Try to Stretch $275
From the crowds in Okhotny Ryad, you’d never know it was a workday. On a recent afternoon, people were strolling past shop windows decorated with garlands, artificial Christmas trees and fashionably dressed mannequins sporting Santa Claus caps.
As the New Year’s shopping season enters its frantic last week, most customers said they hadn’t changed their plans much since last year, while store mangers seemed buoyed by sales after a sleepy November.
Tatyana, a 55-year-old teacher who came to Moscow a few days ago from the Zabaikalsky region in Siberia, looked confused as she stood at the balustrade of the mall’s second level. She has no idea what to give her son.
“He said I shouldn’t get him anything, but I can’t leave him without a present. It’s always so hard to find something for a young man. At the very least I’ll buy him cologne,” she said.
Many of the people in Okhotny Ryad, one of the largest malls in downtown Moscow, did not want to give their names. Most said they were looking for traditional presents again this year — especially cosmetics and candy.
Irina Litvinenko, a corporate clients manager, complained that it was because there aren’t many affordable options in Russia.
“I’ll give traditional presents to my friends, such as perfume and cosmetics kits. Something original is too expensive, and these things are affordable and always necessary, especially for ladies,” said Litvinenko, 33.
The average Russian will buy up to a dozen New Year’s presents this year, spending a total of 8,400 rubles ($275), consulting company Deloitte said in a survey released earlier this month. Total spending for the country’s biggest holiday — including presents, food and entertainment — will average 16,700 rubles this season, the report said.
Last year, the total for holiday spending was 19,800 rubles, the report said, without giving a breakdown. It did say, however, that 49 percent of people wanted to be given money this year, up from 36 percent in 2008.
Store mangers said the amount of money that customers were ready to spend varied enormously, but most said it was shaping up to be a decent holiday season.
“People will pay anywhere from 100 rubles to 10,000 rubles and more at a time,” said a manger at souvenir shop Krasny Kub, or Red Cube, who did not want to be identified because she was not authorized to talk to the media.
She said people were buying everything, “from cups to disco balls,” and sales at the shop had increased twofold in December from the same month last year.
“Our sales have jumped by at least 50 percent this month compared with November,” said Anna Ledovskaya, a manager at L’Occitane, which sells French hair- and body-care products. “The customer flow increased starting from Dec. 16. People are buying presents for relatives. Parents are buying little things for their kids’ teachers and nannies,” she said.
Most customers at Okhotny Ryad, which caters to a middle-class clientele, said their spending on presents wouldn’t be more than 10,000 rubles and many complained that another year of high inflation was partly responsible for higher spending.
“I’m planning to spend up to 10,000 rubles on presents this year. That’ll be more than I spent last year because the prices have increased by 20 to 30 percent, I think,” said Dragan Markovich, 48, a Serb who has been living in Moscow for the last six years.
The government expects inflation to reach about 9 percent for the year, and the State Statistics Service said Wednesday that prices had risen 0.2 percent in the week ending Monday.
Analysts said there had been no changes in consumer behavior ahead of the holidays, because presents are one of the last things that people stop buying in a crisis.
“It’s beyond belief for people not to buy presents. Even in a crisis, they want to please their nearest,” said Anna Romanova, a research director at Synovate Russia, a market research company. “Most people buy customary things — cosmetics, shirts, ties. There’s a traditional boom in the perfumery and household appliance sectors now.”
Managers at some souvenir shops argued that those gifts were banal and boring, while people wanted to get something unconventional and interesting.
“The most popular item people buy at our store as a present is a telescopic fork, which is 62 centimeters long,” said Vladlen Azaryev, an administrator at novelty items shop Le Futur. “It may be very useful for a lady who wants to give her boyfriend something delicious to try from her plate if he’s sitting far away,” he said jokingly.
But only young shoppers seemed to be looking for something out of the ordinary.
Ksenia Sleptsova, a 19-year-old law student, said she wanted to find a meaningful gift for her father, an officer in the paratroops. “My dad collects souvenirs related to the armed forces, and I want to get him something special,” she said. “I’ve heard there’s a kitchenware kit at one of the shops. Even though it’s not customary to give kitchenware to men, I’m sure he’ll understand when he gets a herring dish in the form of an assault rifle from me.”
As the New Year’s shopping season enters its frantic last week, most customers said they hadn’t changed their plans much since last year, while store mangers seemed buoyed by sales after a sleepy November.
Tatyana, a 55-year-old teacher who came to Moscow a few days ago from the Zabaikalsky region in Siberia, looked confused as she stood at the balustrade of the mall’s second level. She has no idea what to give her son.
“He said I shouldn’t get him anything, but I can’t leave him without a present. It’s always so hard to find something for a young man. At the very least I’ll buy him cologne,” she said.
Many of the people in Okhotny Ryad, one of the largest malls in downtown Moscow, did not want to give their names. Most said they were looking for traditional presents again this year — especially cosmetics and candy.
Irina Litvinenko, a corporate clients manager, complained that it was because there aren’t many affordable options in Russia.
“I’ll give traditional presents to my friends, such as perfume and cosmetics kits. Something original is too expensive, and these things are affordable and always necessary, especially for ladies,” said Litvinenko, 33.
The average Russian will buy up to a dozen New Year’s presents this year, spending a total of 8,400 rubles ($275), consulting company Deloitte said in a survey released earlier this month. Total spending for the country’s biggest holiday — including presents, food and entertainment — will average 16,700 rubles this season, the report said.
Last year, the total for holiday spending was 19,800 rubles, the report said, without giving a breakdown. It did say, however, that 49 percent of people wanted to be given money this year, up from 36 percent in 2008.
Store mangers said the amount of money that customers were ready to spend varied enormously, but most said it was shaping up to be a decent holiday season.
“People will pay anywhere from 100 rubles to 10,000 rubles and more at a time,” said a manger at souvenir shop Krasny Kub, or Red Cube, who did not want to be identified because she was not authorized to talk to the media.
She said people were buying everything, “from cups to disco balls,” and sales at the shop had increased twofold in December from the same month last year.
“Our sales have jumped by at least 50 percent this month compared with November,” said Anna Ledovskaya, a manager at L’Occitane, which sells French hair- and body-care products. “The customer flow increased starting from Dec. 16. People are buying presents for relatives. Parents are buying little things for their kids’ teachers and nannies,” she said.
Most customers at Okhotny Ryad, which caters to a middle-class clientele, said their spending on presents wouldn’t be more than 10,000 rubles and many complained that another year of high inflation was partly responsible for higher spending.
“I’m planning to spend up to 10,000 rubles on presents this year. That’ll be more than I spent last year because the prices have increased by 20 to 30 percent, I think,” said Dragan Markovich, 48, a Serb who has been living in Moscow for the last six years.
The government expects inflation to reach about 9 percent for the year, and the State Statistics Service said Wednesday that prices had risen 0.2 percent in the week ending Monday.
Analysts said there had been no changes in consumer behavior ahead of the holidays, because presents are one of the last things that people stop buying in a crisis.
“It’s beyond belief for people not to buy presents. Even in a crisis, they want to please their nearest,” said Anna Romanova, a research director at Synovate Russia, a market research company. “Most people buy customary things — cosmetics, shirts, ties. There’s a traditional boom in the perfumery and household appliance sectors now.”
Managers at some souvenir shops argued that those gifts were banal and boring, while people wanted to get something unconventional and interesting.
“The most popular item people buy at our store as a present is a telescopic fork, which is 62 centimeters long,” said Vladlen Azaryev, an administrator at novelty items shop Le Futur. “It may be very useful for a lady who wants to give her boyfriend something delicious to try from her plate if he’s sitting far away,” he said jokingly.
But only young shoppers seemed to be looking for something out of the ordinary.
Ksenia Sleptsova, a 19-year-old law student, said she wanted to find a meaningful gift for her father, an officer in the paratroops. “My dad collects souvenirs related to the armed forces, and I want to get him something special,” she said. “I’ve heard there’s a kitchenware kit at one of the shops. Even though it’s not customary to give kitchenware to men, I’m sure he’ll understand when he gets a herring dish in the form of an assault rifle from me.”
Ukraine's Orange Revolution Sours
KIEV, Ukraine -- Five years after Victor Yushchenko became the disfigured face of the Orange Revolution, it is tempting to believe the conspiracy theories that he was never actually poisoned at all.
The skin that was once hideously pockmarked is gradually recovering, and with the help of make-up, there is little sign of the attack that nearly killed him back in 2004. Indeed, were it not for the blood tests that confirmed the presence of lethal dioxin poisons, the wear and tear on his cheeks might be simply the strains of steering Ukraine away from Russia's grasp and towards the West.To this day, though, the Ukrainian president remains "vigilant" about his personal security - not that he thinks there was anything particularly personal about the original attack, which was blamed on pro-Kremlin political rivals. Whoever wins next month's presidential elections will find themselves in the firing line, he says, if they try to take Ukraine down the same path he has done."It was not about me, Yushchenko," he said in an interview with The Sunday Telegraph last week. "Ukraine was proving a bad example for Russia, and a good example for Europe, and that was the problem. Irrespective of the name of the next president, if he or she is a democrat, a pro-European politician, they will have similar problems."One other thing, however, also looks certain - that new president is unlikely to be Mr Yushchenko. The man once hailed as democracy's battle-scarred posterboy is trailing far behind in the contest, scraping just single figures in some polls. After personifying the hopes of the Orange Revolution five years ago, he now symbolises the way its glow has faded, having failed to secure either European Union or Nato membership.It marks a sour end to what began as a Christmas political fairy tale five years ago, when Mr Yushchenko and his glamorous blonde ally, Yulia Tymoshenko, formed a kind of "Beauty and the Beast" alliance against the Moscow-favoured Viktor Yanukovych.When Mr Yanukovych triumphed in what was seen as a rigged presidential election, Kiev's Independence Square filled with half a million protestors, who camped out night after night in sub-zero temperatures.People power finally triumphed when Ukraine's supreme court ordered the vote to be re-run on Boxing Day, ushering in Mr Yushchenko as president and Ms Tymoshenko as prime minister.Last week, though, the unusually early cold snap that covered the square's Stalinist-era architecture with thick snow was the only reminder of those euphoric days. Mr Yushchenko and Mrs Tymoshenko, once iconised in Time and Elle magazines respectively, have proved unable to get along, leading the government into paralysis.That, in turn, has stymied efforts at economic and political reform, and convinced Brussels bureaucrats - already suffering from enlargement fatigue - that Kiev's government is far from ready for EU membership. To complete the drift back to square one, Mr Yanukovych - the man painted as the pro-Kremlin villain from the last elections - is favourite to win again this time, with or without fraud.Moscow, which viewed 2004's turmoil as a Western-inspired coup d'etat in its backyard, looks on gleefully.If it is dispiriting for the Orange Revolution's figureheads, it is even more so for its student-based grassroots support, who were originally denounced as CIA-backed subversives when they threw their weight behind Mr Yushchenko's moderate Our Ukraine party. Nazar Pervak recalls how he was shown on government television as an aggressive young rabble-rouser, causing a rift with his father, a judge."It was extremely cold, like it is out there now," said Mr Pervak, 27, sipping coffee in an Independence Square cafe. "But it was very exciting - shopkeepers gave free food and clothes, businessmen even paid for hotels for protesters who came in from outside Kiev."Today, though, I feel very disillusioned, because we didn't use the great chance we had properly. Integration with Europe did not come true either. Now Western Europe simply accepts that Ukraine is now under Russia's influence."So what went wrong? Critics pin some blame on Mr Yushchenko, who failed to use his momentum to give the Augean stables of Ukrainian politics the Herculean spring clean it needed. Parliament remains full of corrupt, criminal MPs, whose punch-ups in the chamber rival those of Ukraine's legendary boxing duo, Klitschko brothers.Thanks to constitutional wrangling and a problem with "electoral tourism", whereby politicians switch allegiances in exchange for favours, it is also hard to get much done.The Yushchenko-Tymoshenko alliance was also forged more on a mutual dislike of Moscow than on any common policies, and over time, they have even parted company on that. Ms Tymoshenko now favours patching things up with Russia, a move seen as a betrayal by Mr Yushchenko, whose relations with the Kremlin are worse than ever.In August, Russian President Dmitri Medvedev withdrew Moscow's ambassador to Kiev, accusing Mr Yushchenko of being "anti-Russian". In an echo of the Litvinenko case in Britain, Moscow also refuses to extradite a suspect in the poisoning plot who moved to Russia.Many Ukrainians also question whether Ms Tymoshenko or Mr Yushchenko really merited their Orange halos in the first place. Ms Tymoshenko, despite her pretty face, is seen as a quarrelsome opportunist, while Mr Yushchenko, although viewed as competent and honest, comes across as slightly plodding.Certainly, interviewing him is not like meeting some Eastern European Tony Blair - he is prone to monologues rather than soundbites, and reluctant to concede fault.Asked why his popularity has slipped so badly, he responds firstly by insisting that he is still going to win, and then by reciting economic growth statistics at length. When The Sunday Telegraph tries to interrupt after five minutes, he tuts and continuing regardless."Last year 23 million tourist visited Ukraine. This figure was 21 million for Turkey. One million Ukrainians travelled to Europe last year, two times more than 2007..." The list goes on and on, reminiscent - to Western ears at least - of Communist-era reports on annual tractor production.Mr Yuschchenko is also under fire for campaigns to demolish all Soviet-era monuments, and to get the Ukrainian famine of the 1930s, when up ten million Ukrainians died, recognised internationally as a Stalin-sponsored genocide. Not only does it seem like a diversion from more immediate problems, it alienates some of the 20 per cent of Ukrainians who are ethnic Russians, who do not share his anomisity to Moscow anyway."The nationalist Ukrainians are trying to divide people into Ukrainian and Russian," said Viktor Knyazev, 31, an adviser in an import-export firm. "Other people died in that famine too, not just Ukrainians.""Both Stalin and Lenin were negative figures, but at least they managed to keep order," added his wife Larisa, 28, who, like her husband, wants Mr Yanukovic back in power. "Why can't we have good relations with Russia?"As things stand, the vote on January 17 is expected to end in a run-off between Mr Yanukovych and Ms Tymoshenko, heralding a gradual thaw with Moscow. Yet despite having the same old faces to vote for, the youthful Orange Revolutionaries are not entirely despondent."There is a total disbelief in these candidates," admitted former activist Dmitry Yurchenko, 27. "But the Orange Revolution did at least change attitudes to politicians - there is a free media now, and people realise they can demand things if they want."What is really needed, they argue, is for a new post-Orange Revolution generation of voters, devoid of the "Post-Soviet" mentality that does not readily question political leaders, and expects them to be omnipotent. "Once Yushchenko was in power, Ukrainians thought everything would simply change," said Mr Pervak. "They don't take responsibility themselves."Mr Yushchenko, meanwhile, may have more time to spend beekeeping, a hobby he has enjoyed since childhood. Compared with running the affairs of 47 million Ukrainians, managing the industrious populations of his hives is a relaxing task. Yet for a man who detests Stalin, it is perhaps a strange choice - after all, with their armies of loyal workers, are bees not natural communists?"No," he replies firmly. "Communists lose their ideals, they are people who bring injustice, who killed tens of millions of my people."With that, the world's only apiarist-president is off, pausing only to show an advice note from one of his junior civil servants on constitutional reform. It probably won't solve his electoral ills, but that isn't the point. In the old days, he says, no lowly functionary would dare tell the president how to do his job. "That's the Orange Revolution for you."
The skin that was once hideously pockmarked is gradually recovering, and with the help of make-up, there is little sign of the attack that nearly killed him back in 2004. Indeed, were it not for the blood tests that confirmed the presence of lethal dioxin poisons, the wear and tear on his cheeks might be simply the strains of steering Ukraine away from Russia's grasp and towards the West.To this day, though, the Ukrainian president remains "vigilant" about his personal security - not that he thinks there was anything particularly personal about the original attack, which was blamed on pro-Kremlin political rivals. Whoever wins next month's presidential elections will find themselves in the firing line, he says, if they try to take Ukraine down the same path he has done."It was not about me, Yushchenko," he said in an interview with The Sunday Telegraph last week. "Ukraine was proving a bad example for Russia, and a good example for Europe, and that was the problem. Irrespective of the name of the next president, if he or she is a democrat, a pro-European politician, they will have similar problems."One other thing, however, also looks certain - that new president is unlikely to be Mr Yushchenko. The man once hailed as democracy's battle-scarred posterboy is trailing far behind in the contest, scraping just single figures in some polls. After personifying the hopes of the Orange Revolution five years ago, he now symbolises the way its glow has faded, having failed to secure either European Union or Nato membership.It marks a sour end to what began as a Christmas political fairy tale five years ago, when Mr Yushchenko and his glamorous blonde ally, Yulia Tymoshenko, formed a kind of "Beauty and the Beast" alliance against the Moscow-favoured Viktor Yanukovych.When Mr Yanukovych triumphed in what was seen as a rigged presidential election, Kiev's Independence Square filled with half a million protestors, who camped out night after night in sub-zero temperatures.People power finally triumphed when Ukraine's supreme court ordered the vote to be re-run on Boxing Day, ushering in Mr Yushchenko as president and Ms Tymoshenko as prime minister.Last week, though, the unusually early cold snap that covered the square's Stalinist-era architecture with thick snow was the only reminder of those euphoric days. Mr Yushchenko and Mrs Tymoshenko, once iconised in Time and Elle magazines respectively, have proved unable to get along, leading the government into paralysis.That, in turn, has stymied efforts at economic and political reform, and convinced Brussels bureaucrats - already suffering from enlargement fatigue - that Kiev's government is far from ready for EU membership. To complete the drift back to square one, Mr Yanukovych - the man painted as the pro-Kremlin villain from the last elections - is favourite to win again this time, with or without fraud.Moscow, which viewed 2004's turmoil as a Western-inspired coup d'etat in its backyard, looks on gleefully.If it is dispiriting for the Orange Revolution's figureheads, it is even more so for its student-based grassroots support, who were originally denounced as CIA-backed subversives when they threw their weight behind Mr Yushchenko's moderate Our Ukraine party. Nazar Pervak recalls how he was shown on government television as an aggressive young rabble-rouser, causing a rift with his father, a judge."It was extremely cold, like it is out there now," said Mr Pervak, 27, sipping coffee in an Independence Square cafe. "But it was very exciting - shopkeepers gave free food and clothes, businessmen even paid for hotels for protesters who came in from outside Kiev."Today, though, I feel very disillusioned, because we didn't use the great chance we had properly. Integration with Europe did not come true either. Now Western Europe simply accepts that Ukraine is now under Russia's influence."So what went wrong? Critics pin some blame on Mr Yushchenko, who failed to use his momentum to give the Augean stables of Ukrainian politics the Herculean spring clean it needed. Parliament remains full of corrupt, criminal MPs, whose punch-ups in the chamber rival those of Ukraine's legendary boxing duo, Klitschko brothers.Thanks to constitutional wrangling and a problem with "electoral tourism", whereby politicians switch allegiances in exchange for favours, it is also hard to get much done.The Yushchenko-Tymoshenko alliance was also forged more on a mutual dislike of Moscow than on any common policies, and over time, they have even parted company on that. Ms Tymoshenko now favours patching things up with Russia, a move seen as a betrayal by Mr Yushchenko, whose relations with the Kremlin are worse than ever.In August, Russian President Dmitri Medvedev withdrew Moscow's ambassador to Kiev, accusing Mr Yushchenko of being "anti-Russian". In an echo of the Litvinenko case in Britain, Moscow also refuses to extradite a suspect in the poisoning plot who moved to Russia.Many Ukrainians also question whether Ms Tymoshenko or Mr Yushchenko really merited their Orange halos in the first place. Ms Tymoshenko, despite her pretty face, is seen as a quarrelsome opportunist, while Mr Yushchenko, although viewed as competent and honest, comes across as slightly plodding.Certainly, interviewing him is not like meeting some Eastern European Tony Blair - he is prone to monologues rather than soundbites, and reluctant to concede fault.Asked why his popularity has slipped so badly, he responds firstly by insisting that he is still going to win, and then by reciting economic growth statistics at length. When The Sunday Telegraph tries to interrupt after five minutes, he tuts and continuing regardless."Last year 23 million tourist visited Ukraine. This figure was 21 million for Turkey. One million Ukrainians travelled to Europe last year, two times more than 2007..." The list goes on and on, reminiscent - to Western ears at least - of Communist-era reports on annual tractor production.Mr Yuschchenko is also under fire for campaigns to demolish all Soviet-era monuments, and to get the Ukrainian famine of the 1930s, when up ten million Ukrainians died, recognised internationally as a Stalin-sponsored genocide. Not only does it seem like a diversion from more immediate problems, it alienates some of the 20 per cent of Ukrainians who are ethnic Russians, who do not share his anomisity to Moscow anyway."The nationalist Ukrainians are trying to divide people into Ukrainian and Russian," said Viktor Knyazev, 31, an adviser in an import-export firm. "Other people died in that famine too, not just Ukrainians.""Both Stalin and Lenin were negative figures, but at least they managed to keep order," added his wife Larisa, 28, who, like her husband, wants Mr Yanukovic back in power. "Why can't we have good relations with Russia?"As things stand, the vote on January 17 is expected to end in a run-off between Mr Yanukovych and Ms Tymoshenko, heralding a gradual thaw with Moscow. Yet despite having the same old faces to vote for, the youthful Orange Revolutionaries are not entirely despondent."There is a total disbelief in these candidates," admitted former activist Dmitry Yurchenko, 27. "But the Orange Revolution did at least change attitudes to politicians - there is a free media now, and people realise they can demand things if they want."What is really needed, they argue, is for a new post-Orange Revolution generation of voters, devoid of the "Post-Soviet" mentality that does not readily question political leaders, and expects them to be omnipotent. "Once Yushchenko was in power, Ukrainians thought everything would simply change," said Mr Pervak. "They don't take responsibility themselves."Mr Yushchenko, meanwhile, may have more time to spend beekeeping, a hobby he has enjoyed since childhood. Compared with running the affairs of 47 million Ukrainians, managing the industrious populations of his hives is a relaxing task. Yet for a man who detests Stalin, it is perhaps a strange choice - after all, with their armies of loyal workers, are bees not natural communists?"No," he replies firmly. "Communists lose their ideals, they are people who bring injustice, who killed tens of millions of my people."With that, the world's only apiarist-president is off, pausing only to show an advice note from one of his junior civil servants on constitutional reform. It probably won't solve his electoral ills, but that isn't the point. In the old days, he says, no lowly functionary would dare tell the president how to do his job. "That's the Orange Revolution for you."
End Of Decade
KIEV, Ukraine -- First, some of the decade’s high points: Democracy triumphed, but only briefly, in the dead of the 2004-2005 winter. Millions of Ukrainians are living better than a decade ago. Many are eating better. Consumer goods are in abundance and many more people can afford them. More cars clog the city streets. Almost all teenagers have mobile phones, even if they have no money to use them.
Today, in fact, it is possible to purchase almost anything, including power, political patronage and university degrees, just like 10 years ago. And herein lies some of the nation’s intractable problems.For all the signs of progress, Ukraine’s achievements don’t decisively add up to a nation that is starting 2010 in better shape than it started the year 2000. Instead, the nation embarks on the new decade hobbled by many of the same old problems: distrust, corruption, instability, billionaires who stifle both democracy and the economy, a judicial system incapable of dispensing justice, a demographic crisis and dire poverty for a quarter or more of its 46 million people. And on and on.Still, taking into account decades and even centuries of misery, Ukrainians may have never had it so good. But millions – perhaps four million Ukrainians – have left the nation in frustration and in search of better lives and better jobs abroad, while many of those stayed behind in the homeland are quick to say that their lives are hard and should be better.Overall, the nation is freer, but still poor and corrupt.Here is a look back:Heroes to zeroesThe 2004 Orange Revolution is the decade’s highlight. It briefly enhanced national self-esteem and raised hopes. But the subsequent political breakup of heroes President Victor Yushchenko and Prime Minister Yulia Tymoshenko created instability, with the nation ending the decade in stagnation and economic recession.The decade started with former President Leonid Kuchma grabbing power after his 1999 re-election. When hundreds of hours of his taped conversations and the Sept. 16, 2000 murder of journalist Georgiy Gongadze showed that Kuchma may have grabbed too much power, people started to revolt.The disobedience of the Ukraine Without Kuchma rallies in the early 2000s paved the way for the 2002 parliamentary election triumph of Yushchenko’s Our Ukraine and Tymoshenko’s eponymous bloc. This national assertiveness culminated in the successful street protests of the Orange Revolution, which overturned the Nov. 21, 2004, presidential election rigged for Victor Yanukovych.Yushchenko was swept into office with high popularity and international adulation. He is ending his five-year term with almost no public support, in no small part because of his administration’s inability to solve crimes and rein in the nation’s high-flying billionaire oligarchs who control such a large share of the nation’s economy.Boom goes bustFueled largely by raw material exports and a credit boom, Ukraine’s decade of robust economic growth came to a screeching halt in the fall of 2008, and then slipped into reverse. The ongoing recession translated into extended furloughs, mass layoffs, a credit drought and a nation edging closer to default and bankruptcy.The central bank spent billions of dollars to prop up the hryvnia, but failed to arrest its slide from Hr 5 to the dollar to Hr 8. The International Monetary Fund rode to the rescue with a $16.4 billion line of credit, but abruptly stopped its lending at $11 billion after it blanched at the fiscal irresponsibility of the nation’s leaders.In rescuing the nation’s commercial banks, perhaps billions of dollars were misspent or stolen. The ex-chief executive officer of Nadra Bank, Igor Gilenko, was among the many accused criminals on the lam by year’s end.Lawlessness reignsThe birth of new media and death of Internet journalist Gongadze, co-founder of one of the country’s first news websites, Ukrainska Pravda, started the decade. The murder triggered civil disobedience and nationwide protests.Digital recordings implicated Kuchma in the crime and so many more: rigging court rulings and elections, illegal surveillance and blackmail. But the authorities spent the rest of the decade squelching any meaningful criminal investigation into the tapes revealed by Mykola Melnychenko, a former Kuchma bodyguard.Law enforcement – from police to prosecutors and judges – remains impotent, corrupt or unwilling to solve the nation’s major crimes.Information ageIn other areas, Ukraine joined the world in logging on to the Internet, blogging and connecting with each other on social networks, on You Tube and by texting. But traditional media – including TV stations with national reach – remained under the ownership of competing groups of influential businesspeople. While censorship is gone, few would argue that Ukraine’s public and media are truly free, at least in the information sphere.Constitutional gridlockThe nation ends the decade still trying to find a Constitution that works. Kuchma sought stronger presidential powers in 2000, but was rebuffed. Yushchenko wants changes to the Constitution he agreed to amend in 2005 to end the Orange Revolution. The guiding document today muddles executive authority, diluting presidential powers and giving the prime minister many executive roles.Economy The hryvnia is worth half of what it was in 2000 against the dollar and inflation has worsened its buying power. In 2000, Yushchenko became prime minister and helped to mitigate the economic lows of the 1990s. He and his deputy prime minister, Tymoshenko, squeezed out corruption from the electricity sector and started paying wages and pensions on time.Combined with his successful introduction of the hryvnia in 1996, Yushchenko was building his reputation as a successful economic manager. But the Yushchenko-Tymoshenko pair did nothing to break Kuchma’s grip over law enforcement or the doling out of state assets to favored insiders in rigged privatizations.Government stakes in chemical factories and regional energy utilities were put on the auction block and sold like fattened calves to oligarchs within the president’s close circle. As the 2004 election neared, Kuchma undertook the mother of all scams by selling the country’s largest steel producer Kryvorizhstal to his son-in-law, Victor Pinchuk, and Donetsk billionaire Rinat Akhmetov for $800 million, a small fraction of its worth.Re-privatization became the mantra of the Orange team of Yushchenko and Tymoshenko. They re-sold Kryvorizhstal to ArcelorMittal in late 2005 for $4.8 billion – six times the Akhmetov-Pinchuk price of a year ago – in a fair, open, transparent, competitive, televised auction. The success was never repeated, before or since, in the nation’s history.International affairsRelations between Kyiv and Moscow deteriorated significantly after the 2004 Orange Revolution, following the defeat of Kremlin-favored presidential candidate Yanukovych. Yushchenko embarked on an agenda to bring Ukraine closer to NATO and the European Union, irritating Moscow.In the end, Ukraine came no closer to either. Yushchenko further alienated Ukraine’s big neighbor by seeking to win international recognition of the Holodomor famine of 1932-1933 as Soviet genocide of millions of Ukrainians who starved to death.Ukraine and Russia sparred over the Russian Black Sea Fleet in Crimea and the 2008 Russia-Georgia war. Disputes over natural gas pricing prompted Moscow to cut off supplies twice, in 2006 and again in 2009.At decade’s end, Russian Prime Minister Vladimir Putin was flirting with his counterpart, Tymoshenko, keeping his distance from Yanukovych and doing nothing to conceal his contempt for Yushchenko.Ukraine’s reputation suffered in many parts of the world as unending tragedies, disasters and political infighting gave rise to questions about whether the nation can govern itself. “Ukraine fatigue” arose in Europe.The Sept. 11, 2001, attacks on America shifted the attention of one of Ukraine’s friendlier international patrons. The U.S. remained bogged down in wars in Afghanistan and Iraq through much of the decade, and is now beset by its own economic troubles and spiraling debt.Death, disease, despairFrom an estimated 54 million persons living in Ukraine in 1991, the decade closed with just under 46 million people estimated to be living in the nation today. There are 8.5 million less Ukrainians than 10 years ago.The nation has yet to find the key to reversing its demographic slide and public health crisis. With one of the highest death and suicides rates in Europe, Ukraine is the European leader in HIV/AIDS prevalence and tuberculosis.It is a world leader in smoking and child alcoholism. The number of Ukrainian drug addicts increased exponentially over the last decade. Officially, Ukraine has more than 500,000 hard-drug users but, unofficially, it is believed to have many more.Poverty may be at the root of much of this social breakdown. Some 26 million Ukrainians earn less than Hr 1,567 ($200) monthly, according to Myroslav Yakibchuk, the head of the National Forum of Labor Unions in Ukraine.No one knows for sure, because so much of the economy remains in the shadows. Some experts say that real disposable income increased by 178 percent in the last 10 years.But debts also grew, reaching $19 billion (about 30 percent of gross domestic product) in sovereign foreign debt and more than $100 billion in foreign debt, private and public.And simply changing the calendar doesn’t wipe the slate clean.
Today, in fact, it is possible to purchase almost anything, including power, political patronage and university degrees, just like 10 years ago. And herein lies some of the nation’s intractable problems.For all the signs of progress, Ukraine’s achievements don’t decisively add up to a nation that is starting 2010 in better shape than it started the year 2000. Instead, the nation embarks on the new decade hobbled by many of the same old problems: distrust, corruption, instability, billionaires who stifle both democracy and the economy, a judicial system incapable of dispensing justice, a demographic crisis and dire poverty for a quarter or more of its 46 million people. And on and on.Still, taking into account decades and even centuries of misery, Ukrainians may have never had it so good. But millions – perhaps four million Ukrainians – have left the nation in frustration and in search of better lives and better jobs abroad, while many of those stayed behind in the homeland are quick to say that their lives are hard and should be better.Overall, the nation is freer, but still poor and corrupt.Here is a look back:Heroes to zeroesThe 2004 Orange Revolution is the decade’s highlight. It briefly enhanced national self-esteem and raised hopes. But the subsequent political breakup of heroes President Victor Yushchenko and Prime Minister Yulia Tymoshenko created instability, with the nation ending the decade in stagnation and economic recession.The decade started with former President Leonid Kuchma grabbing power after his 1999 re-election. When hundreds of hours of his taped conversations and the Sept. 16, 2000 murder of journalist Georgiy Gongadze showed that Kuchma may have grabbed too much power, people started to revolt.The disobedience of the Ukraine Without Kuchma rallies in the early 2000s paved the way for the 2002 parliamentary election triumph of Yushchenko’s Our Ukraine and Tymoshenko’s eponymous bloc. This national assertiveness culminated in the successful street protests of the Orange Revolution, which overturned the Nov. 21, 2004, presidential election rigged for Victor Yanukovych.Yushchenko was swept into office with high popularity and international adulation. He is ending his five-year term with almost no public support, in no small part because of his administration’s inability to solve crimes and rein in the nation’s high-flying billionaire oligarchs who control such a large share of the nation’s economy.Boom goes bustFueled largely by raw material exports and a credit boom, Ukraine’s decade of robust economic growth came to a screeching halt in the fall of 2008, and then slipped into reverse. The ongoing recession translated into extended furloughs, mass layoffs, a credit drought and a nation edging closer to default and bankruptcy.The central bank spent billions of dollars to prop up the hryvnia, but failed to arrest its slide from Hr 5 to the dollar to Hr 8. The International Monetary Fund rode to the rescue with a $16.4 billion line of credit, but abruptly stopped its lending at $11 billion after it blanched at the fiscal irresponsibility of the nation’s leaders.In rescuing the nation’s commercial banks, perhaps billions of dollars were misspent or stolen. The ex-chief executive officer of Nadra Bank, Igor Gilenko, was among the many accused criminals on the lam by year’s end.Lawlessness reignsThe birth of new media and death of Internet journalist Gongadze, co-founder of one of the country’s first news websites, Ukrainska Pravda, started the decade. The murder triggered civil disobedience and nationwide protests.Digital recordings implicated Kuchma in the crime and so many more: rigging court rulings and elections, illegal surveillance and blackmail. But the authorities spent the rest of the decade squelching any meaningful criminal investigation into the tapes revealed by Mykola Melnychenko, a former Kuchma bodyguard.Law enforcement – from police to prosecutors and judges – remains impotent, corrupt or unwilling to solve the nation’s major crimes.Information ageIn other areas, Ukraine joined the world in logging on to the Internet, blogging and connecting with each other on social networks, on You Tube and by texting. But traditional media – including TV stations with national reach – remained under the ownership of competing groups of influential businesspeople. While censorship is gone, few would argue that Ukraine’s public and media are truly free, at least in the information sphere.Constitutional gridlockThe nation ends the decade still trying to find a Constitution that works. Kuchma sought stronger presidential powers in 2000, but was rebuffed. Yushchenko wants changes to the Constitution he agreed to amend in 2005 to end the Orange Revolution. The guiding document today muddles executive authority, diluting presidential powers and giving the prime minister many executive roles.Economy The hryvnia is worth half of what it was in 2000 against the dollar and inflation has worsened its buying power. In 2000, Yushchenko became prime minister and helped to mitigate the economic lows of the 1990s. He and his deputy prime minister, Tymoshenko, squeezed out corruption from the electricity sector and started paying wages and pensions on time.Combined with his successful introduction of the hryvnia in 1996, Yushchenko was building his reputation as a successful economic manager. But the Yushchenko-Tymoshenko pair did nothing to break Kuchma’s grip over law enforcement or the doling out of state assets to favored insiders in rigged privatizations.Government stakes in chemical factories and regional energy utilities were put on the auction block and sold like fattened calves to oligarchs within the president’s close circle. As the 2004 election neared, Kuchma undertook the mother of all scams by selling the country’s largest steel producer Kryvorizhstal to his son-in-law, Victor Pinchuk, and Donetsk billionaire Rinat Akhmetov for $800 million, a small fraction of its worth.Re-privatization became the mantra of the Orange team of Yushchenko and Tymoshenko. They re-sold Kryvorizhstal to ArcelorMittal in late 2005 for $4.8 billion – six times the Akhmetov-Pinchuk price of a year ago – in a fair, open, transparent, competitive, televised auction. The success was never repeated, before or since, in the nation’s history.International affairsRelations between Kyiv and Moscow deteriorated significantly after the 2004 Orange Revolution, following the defeat of Kremlin-favored presidential candidate Yanukovych. Yushchenko embarked on an agenda to bring Ukraine closer to NATO and the European Union, irritating Moscow.In the end, Ukraine came no closer to either. Yushchenko further alienated Ukraine’s big neighbor by seeking to win international recognition of the Holodomor famine of 1932-1933 as Soviet genocide of millions of Ukrainians who starved to death.Ukraine and Russia sparred over the Russian Black Sea Fleet in Crimea and the 2008 Russia-Georgia war. Disputes over natural gas pricing prompted Moscow to cut off supplies twice, in 2006 and again in 2009.At decade’s end, Russian Prime Minister Vladimir Putin was flirting with his counterpart, Tymoshenko, keeping his distance from Yanukovych and doing nothing to conceal his contempt for Yushchenko.Ukraine’s reputation suffered in many parts of the world as unending tragedies, disasters and political infighting gave rise to questions about whether the nation can govern itself. “Ukraine fatigue” arose in Europe.The Sept. 11, 2001, attacks on America shifted the attention of one of Ukraine’s friendlier international patrons. The U.S. remained bogged down in wars in Afghanistan and Iraq through much of the decade, and is now beset by its own economic troubles and spiraling debt.Death, disease, despairFrom an estimated 54 million persons living in Ukraine in 1991, the decade closed with just under 46 million people estimated to be living in the nation today. There are 8.5 million less Ukrainians than 10 years ago.The nation has yet to find the key to reversing its demographic slide and public health crisis. With one of the highest death and suicides rates in Europe, Ukraine is the European leader in HIV/AIDS prevalence and tuberculosis.It is a world leader in smoking and child alcoholism. The number of Ukrainian drug addicts increased exponentially over the last decade. Officially, Ukraine has more than 500,000 hard-drug users but, unofficially, it is believed to have many more.Poverty may be at the root of much of this social breakdown. Some 26 million Ukrainians earn less than Hr 1,567 ($200) monthly, according to Myroslav Yakibchuk, the head of the National Forum of Labor Unions in Ukraine.No one knows for sure, because so much of the economy remains in the shadows. Some experts say that real disposable income increased by 178 percent in the last 10 years.But debts also grew, reaching $19 billion (about 30 percent of gross domestic product) in sovereign foreign debt and more than $100 billion in foreign debt, private and public.And simply changing the calendar doesn’t wipe the slate clean.
Saturday 26 December 2009
Yushchenko says preventing citizenship abuse is a crucial tasks
President Viktor Yushchenko believes that creation of a legal mechanism of preventing abuses in the Ukrainian citizenship is one of the main national tasks.
The head of state therefore suggests introducing particular restrictions for citizens with dual citizenship. The Presidential Secretariat's Citizenship Service reminds that the principle of a single citizenship is in effect in Ukraine. The law on citizenship envisages discontinuation of citizenship both of one's own will and upon submission of public authorities, namely in the event of a voluntary acquisition of foreign citizenship. The pace of immigration movements in the world has significantly increased the number of people having dual citizenship that establishes a legal link of a person with two states simultaneously that may lead to interference with internal affairs of other state under pretense of defending its citizens. It may be that public service, military service, law enforcement service of persons having foreign citizenship in addition to the Ukrainian one threatens to national security of the country. Social security abuse, tax evasion by such persons and their exit to the country whose citizenship they also have make it difficult to bring them to responsibility for crimes committed in Ukraine.
The head of state therefore suggests introducing particular restrictions for citizens with dual citizenship. The Presidential Secretariat's Citizenship Service reminds that the principle of a single citizenship is in effect in Ukraine. The law on citizenship envisages discontinuation of citizenship both of one's own will and upon submission of public authorities, namely in the event of a voluntary acquisition of foreign citizenship. The pace of immigration movements in the world has significantly increased the number of people having dual citizenship that establishes a legal link of a person with two states simultaneously that may lead to interference with internal affairs of other state under pretense of defending its citizens. It may be that public service, military service, law enforcement service of persons having foreign citizenship in addition to the Ukrainian one threatens to national security of the country. Social security abuse, tax evasion by such persons and their exit to the country whose citizenship they also have make it difficult to bring them to responsibility for crimes committed in Ukraine.
Lawyers call for improving procedure on bankruptcy in Ukraine
Lawyers have proposed to improve the procedure on bankruptcy to provide information on new creditors and institution of criminal proceedings on debtors' bankruptcy, according to a press release of the Clifford Chance international law firm. According to the report, lawyers, judges and representatives of the Economy Ministry and the State Department for bankruptcy under the leadership of the Effective Management Foundation are elaborating the relevant draft law on bankruptcy to change the acting law of Ukraine "On renewal of paying capacity of debtors or recognition their bankruptcy.""Western and Ukrainian investors are anxious about unpredictability of the procedure of bankruptcy in Ukraine... Analyzing possible options of development of events in each certain case, our clients on the whole come to conclusion that the law on bankruptcy doesn't protect their rights in full," advisor to the Clifford Chance law firm Oleksiy Soshenko has said.He noted that one of the regulations of the acting law on bankruptcy could become a problem for creditors, under which demands of creditors are considered to be met and can't be reinstated if they miss a 30-day term to address the court with claims against debtors after an official announcement about their bankruptcy.According to Soshenko, all Ukrainian banks are facing the same problem as each bank has thousands of clients, and often it is impossible to keep track of all the information about institution of criminal proceedings on bankruptcy.
Health Ministry: Recent cold wave killed 94 in Ukraine
The number of those who have frozen to death in Ukraine has risen to 94 as of noon onDec. 25,including 21 people who died at home and one in a traffic jam, the Ukrainian Health Ministry's press service has told Interfax-Ukraine. Thirty-five people froze to death in Donetsk province, 11 in Volyn province, and six in Kharkiv province.Four people died due to the cold wave each in Luhansk, Sumy, and Chernivtsi provinces, three each in Zaporizhia, Ivano-Frankivsk, Mykolaiv, Rivne, Kherson, and Khmelnytsky provinces, two each in Dnipropetrovsk, Kirovohrad, and Cherkasy provinces, and one each in Vinnytsia, Lviv, Poltava, Ternopil, and Chernihiv provinces.A total of 1,078 people asked for medical aid due to frostbite, and 755 of them have been hospitalized.The cold wave throughout Ukraine, with temperatures as low as minus 20 C, lasted 7-8 days.
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