Archive

December 15, 2009

Today in Russian Business – Dec 15, 2009

Exillon Energy has raised over $100 million in the first London stock market flotation by a Russian company since the financial crisis.  The Kremlin’s e-Government portal is to begin providing 74 priority electronic public services this...
December 15, 2009

RA’s Daily Russian News Blast – Dec 15, 2009

TODAY: Medvedev celebrates Sakharov, activists say their work is more dangerous now; European Security Treaty ‘smacks of a trap’; tiny island recognizes breakaway states in exchange for aid; NATO chief in Moscow to rebuild relations; f...
December 14, 2009

China’s Turkmen Pipeline

Chinese President Hu Jintao was in Turkmenistan today to take part in a historic ceremony:  he had the honorary privilege of turning on the tap of a new 1,140-mile natural gas pipeline, the first to take gas out of the vast reserves of Centra...
December 14, 2009

DST Continues its Surge with Potential AOL Deal

I just read in the Wall Street Journal that Yuri Milner, the CEO of Digital Sky Technologies (DST), is in talks with AOL to buy its instant messaging service (ICQ), which has 12.6 million users in Germany and 8.4 million users in Russia.  The...
December 14, 2009

Naming Names on the Murder of Magnitsky

The lawyer Jamison Firestone, a founding partner of Firestone Duncan and former employer of the Hermitage lawyer Sergei Magnitsky, has an article in the Moscow Times pointing out that the firing of 20 prison officials is just a distraction from th...
December 14, 2009

Russia’s Containment of NATO

An editorial in today’s Guardian argues that although NATO shouldn’t have to put it in writing that Ukraine and Georgia will never be members, it should halt its expansion because Russia doesn’t like it and there are various conf...
December 14, 2009

Putin’s Russia Worse than Soviet Union for Dissidents

Bloomberg has some interesting quotes from Oleg Orlov, Lyudmila Alexeyeva, and Sergei Kovalyov on the sidelines of a conference commemorating the 20th anniversary of Andrei Sakharov’s death.  Some of today’s human rights activists...
December 14, 2009

Energy Blast – Dec 14, 2009

‘Mounting skepticism and deadlocked negotiations have culminated in an announcement that the Copenhagen Climate Conference will not result in a comprehensive global climate deal,’ Mikhail Gorbachev writes in the Moscow Times. &nbs...
December 14, 2009

Today in Russian Business – Dec 14, 2009

Investors are demanding higher premiums for state-run company debt such as those of Russia’s Gazprom, over fears that yield spreads could widen further as a result of deteriorating public finances.  The FT writes on the monogorod –...