Two Russian youths were sentenced to prison terms for a racially motivated attack on a Somali television reporter in the eastern Russian city of Yekaterinburg, RIA Novosti news agency reported Thursday.
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December 14, 2006A senior Kremlin adviser said Tuesday that Russia doesn’t intend to initiate the creation of a global natural gas cartel, but said such a project couldn’t be totally ruled out.
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November 15, 2006NATO advisers have warned that Russia may be seeking to create a gas cartel stretching from Algeria to central Asia to use as a political weapon in dealings with Europe, the Reuters news agency reported on Tuesday quoting its sources in the military bloc.
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Baffour Gyan, Ghanaian striker who plays for the Russian club Saturn Ramenskoya has accused Spartak Moscow captain Yegor Titov of racism.
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November 10, 2006The U.S. government has frozen assets of two men from the former Soviet Union. Viktor Bout and Dmitry Popov are accused of illegally supplying weapons to rebels in the Democratic Republic of Congo.
According to a statement from the White House, the two were supplying weapons to the fighters in the east of the country using a small airline as cover. The arms were allegedly traded for illegal diamonds in Africa.
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November 3, 2006Russian businessman placed on the list of individuals allegedly involved in delivering weapons to Congo has denied his involvement after President George W. Bush said earlier this week he had ordered that assets be frozen of dissident general Laurent Nkunda and six other individuals, including Viktor Bout.
Russian entrepreneur Viktor Bout denied his involvement in deliveries of weapons to the Democratic Republic of Congo on Wednesday. “I have absolutely nothing to do with any shipments of weapons to Congo,†Bout told Russia’s Ekho Moskvy radio.
Previously, Viktor Bout had been accused of illegally selling weapons to a number of countries, including African nations.
On Tuesday President George W. Bush on Tuesday ordered that assets be frozen of dissident general Laurent Nkunda and six others considered by the White House to be destabilizing forces in the Democratic Republic of Congo, Reuters reported. Bush issued an executive order immediately blocking any assets under U.S. jurisdiction of seven individuals accused of impeding disarmament activities, violating international laws on the targeting of children, or violating the U.N. arms embargo.
The move came two days after a presidential election in the central African country, which is home to the United Nations’ largest peacekeeping force. The vote, praised by foreign observers as largely peaceful and transparent, was meant to bring an end to decades of conflict and pillage that have left the mineral-rich country destitute.
Nkunda, a Tutsi accused of war crimes allegedly committed in 2004, leads a rebellion from Congo’s eastern hills and is reinventing himself as a protector of all Congolese excluded by the central government. Also targeted by the executive order was Hutu rebel leader Ignace Murwanashyaka, president of Forces Democratiques pour la Liberation du Rwanda (FDLR). The FDLR is accused of taking part in Rwanda’s 1994 genocide.
The U.N. last year extended the arms embargo on Congo and introduced a travel ban and assets freeze on those violating the embargo.
Others named in the executive order were: Khawa Panga Mandro, former president of the Party for Unity and Safeguarding of the Integrity of Congo (PUSIC); Viktor Anatolijevitch Bout, owner of the Great Lakes Business Company and Business Air Services; Sanjivan Singh Ruprah, a businessman; Dimitri Igorevich Popov, general manager of the Great Lakes Business Company; and Douglas Mpano, manager of the Great Lakes Business Company.
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November 1, 2006Angolan President Jose Eduardo Dos Santos arrives in Moscow for a three-day visit Monday with an agenda dominated by bilateral economic and international issues, Kremlin press office reported in Monday.
Russia has been seeking to re-establish contacts with African states, including oil-rich Angola, under President Vladimir Putin. The president and Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov made separate tours of the continent this fall, signaling a fresh interest in business cooperation since the collapse of the Soviet Union, which supplied arms and other goods to Africa in the ideological standoff with the West.
Russia is currently Angola’s 10th largest partner, according to Rossiiskaya Gazeta, a government daily. But meeting with Lavrov in September, Soviet-educated Dos Santos urged more intensive cooperation with Russia, above all in the development of new iron ore, oil and gas deposits, and space.
The Kremlin press office said: “A set of bilateral documents is expected to be signed at the meeting.†Other areas of cooperation between Russia and Angola include diamond production, power engineering, and fisheries. Russia’s largest diamond producer, Alrosa, has about a 40% stake in the Catoca diamond joint venture in Angola, which produces around 6 million carats of crude diamonds a year.
Russian companies are helping the country build the largest hydropower plant in the region, with a capacity of 520 mWt, and are in talks on the construction of power lines. Russian fishing companies also catch up to 25,000 metric tons of sea products a year in Angolan waters.
Angola has shown brisk economic development exploiting its vast mineral resources since the government signed a ceasefire agreement with American-backed UNITA rebels in 2002, following 27 years of bloody civil war. The country, which was in ruins several years ago, plans to export up to 2 million barrels of oil annually, largely to the United States and China, by 2008, RIA Novosti reports.
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October 30, 2006A Russian yacht with a two-man crew that was sailing across the Red Sea on its way to the Kamchatka Peninsula in Russia’s Fast East has been detained in Eritrea, either by officials or an armed group, an official in the Kamchatka administration said Tuesday, the RIA Novosti news agency reports.
The Svenja, owned by Kamchatka’s Yacht Racing Federation, was seized while docking on the coast of the northeast African country after running out of fuel in stormy weather, according to a radio-message received by a nearby Russian ship.
The ship then informed Kamchatka authorities of the incident by e-mail.
The spokesman said it remains unclear who is detaining the crew, Eritrean authorities or an armed group. The two men, one of whom is the yacht federation’s chief Yevgeny Panchenko, have had their identification documents and navigation charts seized, he said.
The Russian Foreign Ministry has been informed of the incident, RIA Novosti reports.
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October 27, 2006
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