Russia’s natural-resources ministry said on Monday that a oil pipeline leak threatened environmental damage, but the pipeline’s operator and emergency officials said the spill was far smaller than the ministry claimed and had already been cleaned up.
Group of Eight (G8) leaders on Monday launched a fresh bid to pin down an elusive global trade pact, seeking to give a positive outcome to a big-power summit riven by discords over the Middle East. Hopes of progress towards unblocking deadlocked world trade talks raised spirits at the end of the G8 summit in St Petersburg.
Group of Eight (G8) leaders have been told Iran is seriously considering a package of incentives aimed at getting it to halt its nuclear programme, South African President Thabo Mbeki said on Monday. He said he passed on that message during his meetings with G8 leaders in the Russian Federation.
A Kremlin public-relations blitz ahead of the Group of Eight (G8) summit and an apparent softening of Washington’s stance have failed to disguise an ill-tempered debate gnawing at the heart of East-West relations: is Russia democratic? By some counts, cooperation between Russia and its G8 partners is in rude health ahead of the summit.
A plane carrying the chief of staff of the Russian navy and other officers caught fire after crash-landing at Simferopol airfield in Crimea, Ukraine, Interfax news agency said on Monday. It was the fourth serious aviation incident involving Russian passenger planes in 36 hours, one of which killed more than 130 people.
It can be a delicacy or status symbol, a cure-all or even an aphrodisiac, but ecologists are warning that Russian caviar could disappear altogether as the Caspian Sea’s sturgeon population reaches dangerously low levels. The WWF conservation group has for the past few months waged a campaign to persuade Russians to give up their caviar habit for six years.
A series of earthquakes measuring from 5,5 to 6,9 on the Richter scale rocked Russia’s far-eastern Kamchatka peninsula early on Sunday, hitting the same spot where powerful tremors left hundreds of people without shelter last week, the Kamchatka seismological service said.
One of three earthquakes that hit Russia’s remote north-eastern Kamchatka peninsula almost completely destroyed three small villages, local authorities were quoted as saying early on Saturday by Interfax news agency. Up to 180 people were evacuated on Saturday from the villages of Korf and Tilichiki.
A major earthquake hit a distant, sparsely populated region of Russia’s far east early on Friday, causing unknown damage and possible injuries, emergency officials said. The United States Geological Survey and Japan’s Meteorological Agency estimated the temblor to be about 7,7-magnitude.
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/ 27 February 2006
Russia on Monday downplayed progress on its plan to alleviate fears over Iran’s nuclear programme, saying there was still work to be done to reach agreement and warning that time was quickly running out ahead of a March 6 deadline. "This is a complex issue and the negotiations are difficult," said Sergei Kiriyenko, Russia’s chief nuclear negotiator with Iran.
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/ 25 February 2006
Russian poet Gennady Aigi, who was often considered a contender for the Nobel Prize in literature, has died at the age of 71, news agencies reported on Friday. His poems, written in the indigenous language of the Chuvashia region, were translated into scores of other languages.
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/ 25 February 2006
The death toll from the collapse of a Moscow market roof has reached at least 64, with 22 people still hospitalised, an official with the Russian emergencies ministry said early on Saturday. Rescuers have retrieved 63 bodies from the rubble of the market where the roof collapsed on Thursday, and one more person died in hospital.
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/ 10 February 2006
Finance chiefs from the world’s leading industrial nations kick off two days of discussions in Moscow on Friday focused squarely on mounting Western concern over the Kremlin’s swelling clout in world oil and gas markets. Taking its first turn at the helm of the Group of Eight, Russia has set a diverse agenda for the meeting.
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/ 2 February 2006
Residents of Moscow and western Russian regions braced for more Arctic temperatures on Wednesday as a cold front that has taxed municipal heating systems in Siberia pushed westward. Temperatures in the Russian capital dropped to minus 20 degrees Celsius overnight and at least four people dies of exposure.
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/ 23 January 2006
Russia’s intelligence service on Monday accused four British diplomats of involvement in a spy ring in which agents allegedly passed secrets through a high-tech communications system hidden in an innocent-looking stone in a Moscow park.
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/ 22 January 2006
Two explosions ripped through Russia’s main natural gas-supply pipeline to Armenia and Georgia on Sunday, halting supplies at a time of freezing temperatures and sparking accusations of sabotage from Georgian President Mikhael Saakashvili. Officials said it could take up to four days to repair the damage.
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/ 21 January 2006
Freezing air from Siberia sent temperatures across much of northern and eastern Europe diving on Friday and the death toll from the cold rose to more than 70 in Russia, the hardest hit in the region. Temperatures fell to minus 33 degrees Celsius in the eastern part of Estonia.
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/ 19 January 2006
Cold weather so painful that even winter-hardened Russians complained about it has gripped Moscow and much of the rest of the country. At least two dozen people have reportedly died of exposure nationwide and Russians used a record amount of electricity to keep warm. Temperatures dropped to minus 30 degrees Celsius overnight.
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/ 18 January 2006
Twenty-four people froze to death in western Russia and Moscow switched to a ”strict” energy conservation regime on Wednesday as overnight temperatures plunged below minus 30 degrees Celsius in the capital and to substantially colder levels elsewhere in the country.
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/ 17 January 2006
Two people froze to death in Moscow, officials said on Tuesday, as Arctic cold from Siberia descended on western Russia, sending nighttime temperatures to as low as minus 36 degrees Celsius and prompting warnings of power cuts to some businesses. Forecasters said the cold snap is expected to last most of the week.
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/ 16 January 2006
A fire broke out in an office building in the Russian Pacific coast city of Vladivostok on Monday, killing nine people and injuring at least 15 others as trapped victims jumped from windows to escape the smoke and flames. Officials said that some stairwells in the building were blocked by gates, hampering rescue efforts.
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/ 27 December 2005
Nearly 80 people suffered coughing and breathing problems on Monday after a gas was released in one of four apparently criminal attacks on a major chain of Saint Petersburg shops, officials in Russia’s second city said. Terrorism was not suspected, a spokesperson for the Federal Security Service said.
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/ 26 December 2005
The approximately 3 000 unidentified bodies buried in a cemetery outside Moscow each year are the tip of a wider and potentially disastrous tendency in Russia. In a study earlier this month, the World Bank said Russian men have "short, brutal lives" and that the country faces an "alarming population decline".
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/ 21 December 2005
Authorities in the far eastern Russian city of Khabarovsk cut off water supplies to 10 000 inhabitants on Wednesday as a toxic slick from China floated downriver toward the city. The spill from a Chinese chemical-factory explosion last month was about 30km up the Amur River from city limits.
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/ 20 December 2005
A toxic slick floating down a river from China for more than a month was due to reach the Russian city of Khabarovsk within hours and experts were making last-minute preparations to deal with the poison. Khabarovsk residents have been stocking up on drinking water and making other arrangements for weeks and the city was calm as the benzene slick floated to within around 15km of the city limits.
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/ 2 November 2005
Nearly two-thirds of Russians questioned in a new poll do not believe that business can be both honest and profitable, the Romir monitoring company reported. About 59% of the poll’s 1 600 respondents said it was impossible to profit from a business if one paid all the proper taxes and gave out no bribes, researchers said, adding that in large cities the percentage of sceptics rose to 64%.
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/ 27 October 2005
Russia put Iran’s first ever satellite into space on Thursday, as a Kosmos-3M rocket blasted off from the northwestern Plesetsk launch site carrying one Russian and seven foreign devices, the Russian space agency said. The Iranian press has described the satellite as being for telecommunications and research purposes.
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/ 20 October 2005
Mikhail Khodorkovsky, the founder of the Yukos oil giant and formerly Russia’s wealthiest man, has been sent to a prison colony in eastern Siberia to serve the rest of his eight-year sentence for financial crimes. Alexander Pleshkov, head of the punishment implementation department for Siberia, said the the tycoon had been sent to a colony in the Krasnokamensk district of Chita province
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/ 18 October 2005
Shooting broke out on Tuesday morning in three districts of the southern Russian city of Nalchik, as police and security forces said they were launching special operations to detain suspected militants. Alleged Islamic extremists conducted a coordinated series of attacks on police and other government buildings in the city last Thursday.
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/ 14 October 2005
They advance slowly and carefully, hugging close to the wall of a souvenir store, communicating with hand signals in a town shrouded in heavy morning fog. Without warning, the tense quiet is shattered as the special forces unit, backed by an armoured vehicle nearby, opens fire on the store with grenades and automatic weapons.
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/ 14 October 2005
Russian security forces killed a group of eight armed rebels and freed five hostages after storming a police station in the southern city of Nalchik early on Friday where the gunmen were holed up following a deadly rampage, a local official said, according to the Interfax news agency.
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/ 13 October 2005
France’s Amelie Mauresmo crashed at the first hurdle in the ,3-million Kremlin Cup on Thursday, going out 6-1, 6-1 in the second round of the WTA event to Italy’s Francesca Schiavone. Mauresmo, the second seed, looked weary after her loss to American Lindsay Davenport in the final of the Grand Prix in Filderstadt, Germany on Sunday.