Archive

July 25, 2008

Today in Russian Business – July 25, 2008

Finance Minister Alexei Kudrin has reportedly compared the country’s inflation problem with nuclear war. Read more on what Hermitage Capital is calling a $230 million tax fraud in the FT and Telegraph. Mikhail Prokhorov’s Onexim Group has launched...
July 25, 2008

RA’s Daily Russia News Blast – July 25, 2008

TODAY: Russia may withdraw OSCE funding; National Bolshevik web master jailed; court requests Khodorkovsky evaluation; Medvedev working on new personnel; Russia may retaliate with Cuba bomber base; religious battle with Ukraine. Russia is threaten...
July 24, 2008

NPR: Russia, Riches, and the Law

Marshall Goldman, Christopher Stewart, and Robert Amsterdam were featured on an hour-long discussion on Russia for Tom Ashbrook’s show On Point. Listen to the broadcast here. Russia, Riches, and the Law Aired: Thursday, July 24, 2008 10-11AM...
July 24, 2008

The Other Prisoner

Mikhail Khodorkovsky may be Russia’s most well known political prisoner, but there’s no underestimating the urgent centrality of former Deputy Finance Minister Sergei Storchak to the Kremlin’s bitter clan wars. Storchak was a res...
July 24, 2008

Grigory Pasko on Russia’s Parole Process, Part 2

[Editor’s note: In light of Mikhail Khodorkovsky’s recent parole request, we asked our correspondent (and former political prisoner) Grigory Pasko to share his experience going through the process of applying for conditional early rele...
July 24, 2008

Russia Puts an End to Fake Auctions

Some good news out of Russia: no longer will they hold those famously non-transparent bidding processes with energy companies to award oil/gas exploration and production licenses, which usually ended with either Gazprom or Rosneft winning, and som...
July 24, 2008

Orthodox Church Edges Out Civil Society

In the opening chapter of Steve LeVine’s interesting new book, he recounts a visit to the Russian human rights NGO Memorial in the late 1980s, whose offices and museum exhibits “buzzed with researchers, journalists, visitors, and forei...
July 24, 2008

Putin Out to Destroy Mechel?

He may not be president anymore, and perhaps there’s some uncertainty over what portfolios he covers as prime minister, but nobody doubts that Vladimir Putin can still crash the value of a company with a few swift words. That’s what ha...
July 24, 2008

Gazprom’s Canadian Secret

With so much attention given to Gazprom’s moves to seal up supply in Central Asia, Iran, Northern Africa, the Gulf of Guinea, and Latin America, it seems that many have overlooked Russia’s quiet incursion into North America through the...
July 24, 2008

Energy Blast – July 24, 2008

US government scientists estimate that the Arctic holds potentially a fifth of the world’s remaining oil and gas reserves – 90 billion barrels of undiscovered oil, and as much gas as all the reserves already known to exist in Russia. India’s...