Editor’s note: Readers who have ever had the pleasure of flying in Russia or the Near Abroad have likely experienced the phenomenon of the rolling two-hour rescheduling of flights. Soviet aviation rules, which have remained unchanged for decades, require an airline to provide passengers with a meal if a flight is delayed for more than two hours. The easiest way to get around this wholly unnecessary expense is to simply resechedule the flight every two hours, without providing passengers any information on the real state of affairs, so they have to anxiously sit in the airport, never knowing if the plane will actually take off this time or not. The reason this trick works is that theoretically, a rescheduling is not the same thing as a delay, it is an entirely new scheduled takeoff time that resets the clock to zero, so that when the plane finally does take off half a day or more after it was originally scheduled to do so, it is technically less than two hours delayed. Our Russia correspondent Grigory Pasko recently discovered that rolling two-hour rescheduling is still alive and well.

Russia is on its way towards accession into the World Trade Organization (WTO). Our statesmen do not tire of repeating to us that accession will give the country a most powerful impulse for raising investment attractiveness and the growth of the country’s economy.

However any businessman will tell you that for him the perception of every country begins with its airport. And in general, the ability of these airports to get you successfully and quickly transported to the desired destination within the country. All the more so, in the eyes of this foreign businessman, to successfully get him to the location where he has bravely decided to sink his capital.