Hermitage Capital Management has issued a report highly critical of the management of the Gazprom, Russia's largest company. Hermitage, a minority shareholder in Gazprom, wants Vadim Kleiner, research director of Hermitage, to be elected to the Gazprom board. Scrutinizing last year's accounts, Hermitage found a... MORE

Russian Defense Minister Sergei Ivanov triumphantly announced the start on June 9 of military exercises of a scale that "Russia has not seen before". The codename is "Mobilnost (Mobility) – 2004" and indeed the key element is the airlift of three combat units: one company... MORE

Unofficially, Russian President Vladimir Putin has indicated that he will not attend the NATO summit in Istanbul on June 28-29. NATO spokesman James Appathurai said several days ago that "discussions are still ongoing with Moscow, and the alliance has not been officially notified whether Putin... MORE

Prosecutors in Qatar have asked that two Russian special services agents accused of assassinating former Chechen separatist President Zelimkhan Yandarbiyev in February be sentenced to death. Dmitri Afanasyev, an attorney representing the accused Russians, said the prosecution had asked for the death penalty in the... MORE

The past week has seen surprising developments on several fronts in Russia's war on corruption. Taken together, they remind us of the magnitude of the corruption that has such deep roots. But these events also demonstrate that the Russian state is sporadic and selective in... MORE

A statue of Yuri Andropov, the Soviet leader and KGB head, has been erected in front of the building housing the Karelia Federal Security Service (FSB) directorate in Petrozavodsk, Karelia's capital city. The 3.5-meter statue stands in a square on a street named after Andropov,... MORE

As world oil prices climb to new heights, officials and experts in Moscow revise upwards their production plans and propose quick solutions for clearing the bottlenecks in oil export capacity. In this stream of optimistic commentary, one key channel for delivering the Caspian oil to... MORE

On June 4 in Prague, Russian left-wing activists from the three Baltic states led the founding conference of the "Russian Party of the European Union." Main initiators of the party are: Tatyana Zhdanoka from Latvia, Georgii Bystrov from Estonia, and Sergey Dmitriev from Lithuania. The... MORE

This week Russian President Vladimir Putin has a busy diplomatic schedule. After attending the D-Day ceremonies on June 6, the first Russian president so honored, Putin flew to Mexico, in the first-ever visit to that country by a Russian head of state. He will then... MORE

Several events this week, seemingly unrelated, neatly illustrate the gradual closing of horizons in Russian democracy. The most dramatic and visible of the three was the June 2 firing of Leonid Parfenov, the charismatic host of NTV's weekly "Namedni" talk show. Technically, he was removed... MORE