Year: 2008

February 13, 2008

Today in Russian Business

Sberbank, Russia’s largest state-controlled bank, has started actively buying shares on the market. An embargo on travel and trade between Georgia and Russia that has lasted almost 16 months could end as early as this month. The flagship Mos...
February 13, 2008

RA’s Daily Russia News Blast – Feb. 13, 2008

TODAY: Putin threatens to target missiles at Ukraine but Russia wants a ban on the use of weapons in space; Russia’s ‘Corporate Raiders’; Boris Nemtsov suspends membership of Union of Right Forces. Vladimir Putin will give his seventh and final an...
February 12, 2008

Grigory Pasko: Déja-vu in Brussels, Part 1

Déja-vu in Brussels, Part 1 By Grigory Pasko, journalist In Moscow Recently, Polish prime-minister Donald Tusk visited Moscow and offered Russia a new variant for the construction of a new «Yamal-Europe» gas pipeline as an alternative to the «Nord...
February 12, 2008

Gazprom Parties Hard, But Disappoints

It sounds like it was quite the bash: 6,000 people attending performances by Tina Turner, Deep Purple, and Alla Pugacheva (who managed to get both Dmitri Medvedev and Sergei Ivanov to get up and dance in front of the stage) to help Gazprom celebra...
February 12, 2008

Putin on the Private Sector

Once in a while the Russian president will say something that no rational-minded person would disagree with: “A private company motivated to be effective will often be better manager than a government official who doesn’t always have an idea...
February 12, 2008

The Precedent of Separatist Sovereignty

What to make of Sergei Ivanov’s speech at the Munich security conference? Some think that he was playing “good cop” to Putin’s “bad cop” – striking a conciliatory and reasonable tone on Kosovo discussions ...
February 12, 2008

Welcome Wall Street Journal Readers

I’ve seen that many visitors today have made their way over from the Wall Street Journal site via my YouTube channel of the Lev Ponomarev video – for those of you who didn’t, I highly recommend you see the Bret Stephens article a...
February 12, 2008

Canada’s Russian Roulette

Claudia Cattaneo of the Financial Post has a great column on the Petro-Canada and Gazprom fiasco: Marrying Gazprom like Russian roulette Claudia Cattaneo, Financial Post The best deal Petro-Canada will make this year is one it didn’t do R...
February 12, 2008

Energy Blast, Feb. 12, 2008

The news yesterday was that Russia would cancel Iraq’s $12bn debt “without resurrecting earlier demands of preferential access to Iraqi oil fields in exchange”. The news today is that Russia is “counting on” Iraqi joint projects, and is to begin i...