Nezavisimaya Gazeta
Moldova: Moscow makes next move
A presidential campaign is already in full swing in Moldova, a country that does not have a presidential election law. The bill will probably be passed after a national referendum, planned for September. However, even now it is clear that the voters would prefer the right to elect their leader directly rather than have it done by the parliament. Local analysts believe Moldova might make a U-turn in the wake of these elections. Sergei Naryshkin, chief of staff of the Russian president’s Executive Office, discussed the issue with Moldova’s ex-president, Moldovan Communist Party leader Vladimir Voronin, at a meeting in Moscow on Tuesday.
Vladimir Voronin’s arrival in Moscow was in fact predictable after Moldova’s Foreign Ministry filed yet another note of protest over the Russian Foreign Ministry’s critical comment on awarding members of the Ilascu group. The group was arrested for terrorism in the Transdnestr Region in 1992. The group’s leader, Ilie Ilascu, was first sentenced to death but eventually extradited to Moldova on Russia’s initiative. Group members were awarded with the Moldovan Republic’s highest order last week, which provoked a harsh statement from the Russian Foreign Ministry.
Moldova has now accused Russia of a biased view of 1992’s dramatic events. Moldovan mass media are unanimous in proclaiming a diplomatic war between the two countries.
Moldovan analysts are sure that the latest statement issued by the country’s diplomats will cool relations with Russia, and, moreover, will cut Prime Minister Vladimir Filat’s chances of winning the presidential election. Until recently he was the candidate least inclined to take swipes at Moscow, unlike his rival, acting president and parliament speaker Mihai Gimpu. Filat could at least have expected Moscow’s non-interference, if not its support; but the latest statement has changed the situation.
Voronin’s visit was therefore well-timed, and Russian officials must have listened to him. Moldovan communists are likely to sweep the upcoming elections. Their supporters hold a pro-Russian position, while supporters of the liberals led by Gimpu and the liberal democrats led by Filat are largely pro-Romanian. The two parties are currently vying for influence in Moldova, while the politicians are trying to cash in on voter sentiment.
Arkady Barbarosh, director of the Center for Social Policy in Chisinau, suggests the officials meeting in Moscow could just as well have named the candidate the Moldovan communists will nominate to run for president.
Rossiiskaya Gazeta
The Kursk disaster: Sunken secrets
Today marks the 10th anniversary of the most tragic disaster in Russia’s recent history. On August 12, 2000 the nuclear-powered missile submarine cruiser Kursk sank with 118 crew members on board during the Northern Fleet drills in the Barents Sea.
Stories and rumors about the fate of the newest submarine with one of the best crews abounded from the first days after the tragedy. Now, 10 years later, world and Russian media are again discussing the tragedy and questioning the official findings of the Prosecutor-General’s Office, which failed to find a guilty party. Relatives of the deceased sailors will, of course, never get over the loss of their husbands, fathers and sons.
What are the unquestioned facts? On August 10, 2000, the Kursk put to sea to take part in Northern Fleet drills. On the morning of August 12, it fired a Granit cruise missile in a mock attack on a squadron led by the aircraft carrier Admiral Kuznetsov and the fleet’s flagship, the nuclear-powered cruiser Pyotr Veliky. A few hours later, the submarine was to have finished off the token enemy with drill torpedoes.
But at that moment, the sonar-man on the Pyotr Veliky recorded a clapping noise instead of a torpedo sound and the ship experienced a palpable shake. The Pyotr Veliky felt the impact of explosions from the Kursk some 40 kilometers away.
The original case was opened under an article detailing the violation of navigation rules leading to a collision and the sinking of the submarine, but by late August it became clear that the nearest Russian ship was 40 kilometers from the Kursk. Eighteen different interpretations were put forward, including the possible firing of a torpedo by a foreign submarine, a collision with a foreign submarine, a World War II mine, sabotage, and many others. One of the last was a non-standard situation aboard, but no one took it seriously.
So what is the final official story? The explosion of a drill torpedo placed in the tube and ready to be launched. A detonation equivalent to 300 kilograms of TNT killed the full complement of the first compartment. After 136 seconds, the other torpedoes went off. The violent shock and incoming water killed the submariners in the forward compartments. Such an explosion on land would have left a crater as large as a football pitch.
This explanation is not challenged by the experts. But neither the investigators nor the experts have been able to answer the main question: what caused the explosion in the first place?
GZT.ru
S-300 missiles deployed in Abkhazia
Air Force Commander-in-Chief Alexander Zelin has announced that S-300 air defense missiles have been deployed on the territory of Abkhazia to cover its airspace and prevent the violation of its state borders.
Georgia expressed its outrage over the deployment, but journalists found out that S-300s had been brought to Gudauta back in November 2008. Experts also believe that the missiles are intended mainly to counteract the United States, should they decide to send their naval ships to the Black Sea again, rather than Georgia’s planes of which there are few.
Colonel-General Zelin has been speaking about how Abkhazia will be protected against possible air attacks. The aviation will not be permanently based in Abkhazia, but the mission (of covering the territory from air attacks) will be solved in a multi-pronged manner, and that also includes air defense of the territory of South Ossetia by frontline and army aviation patrols. The S-300 system has been deployed on the territory of Abkhazia to provide air defense of Abkhazia and South Ossetia together with the land forces’ air defense assets.
The general stressed that S-300s cover only the territory of Abkhazia while in South Ossetia, which has a smaller territory, the regular air defense forces can do the job. The entire grouping is aimed at destroying air targets.
Tbilisi’s reaction to General Zelin’s statement was predictable. The Georgian Minister for Reintegration, Timur Yakobashvili, said that S-300s upset the balance of forces in Europe, create tensions and instability and, rather oddly, suggested that the deployment of the complex was spearheaded against NATO and the United States and their missile defense complexes in Eastern Europe.
Meanwhile, Anton Lavrov of the Strategies and Technology Analysis Center has said that the S-300PS missiles were moved to Abkhazia back in November 2008 and are now being used to cover the Russian contingent in South Ossetia. The missile has a range of about 80 km (50 miles), which puts it out of range of Tbilisi or the American missile defense facilities in Poland.
Another Center expert, Konstantin Makiyenko, said that S-300s could be moved towards Tbilisi in the event of an armed conflict with Georgia. However, he said he was confident that the missiles were intended not to repel Georgian attacks but to protect the air space if the U.S. intervenes, like in September 2008.
RBC daily
Dagestan awaits Kremlin cash
Dagestan may get its own federal targeted program. President Medvedev essentially approved President of Dagestan Magomedsalam Magomedov’s request during their meeting yesterday in the Russian president’s Sochi residence. They have yet to decide on the amount of money to be allocated, but the republic’s government is hoping for several hundred billion rubles.
This was a planned meeting between Dmitry Medvedev and his Dagestani protégé. According to a source in the Government House, it was initiated by Presidential Plenipotentiary Envoy to the North Caucasus Federal District Alexander Khloponin. Medvedev noted that Dagestan was highly subsidized. About 79% of the republic’s budget in 2009 and over 80 percent in 2010 came from grants.
The head of state touched upon unresolved social issues and then moved on to the main issue: investment. “This is not going well at the moment,” Medvedev acknowledged. “Almost nothing has been done recently. We cannot continue developing the republic’s economy without investment.”
The president of Dagestan said that terrorists had significantly expanded their activities across the region, that they were putting pressure on entrepreneurs and running a protection racket. This state of affairs has led to investor interest in the republic to fall to critical levels, and capital flight has started. Dagestan’s main goal today is not attracting new investors, but preserving existing ones.
The republic’s head asked Moscow to provide Dagestan with more forces and money, before approaching the main issue. “It would be reasonable to establish a federal targeted program for Dagestan,” he proposed. “Such programs proved effective in Chechnya and Ingushetia.”
The size of the allocation to Dagestan was not discussed, but the republic’s government expects to receive hundreds of billions of rubles. The federal center plans to invest 32 billion rubles in Ingushetia over six years and 120.6 billion rubles in Chechnya over three years. Dagestan is hoping to get much more money than Chechnya – at least twice as much.
Alexander Pochinok, a senator and former deputy presidential plenipotentiary envoy to the Southern Federal District, believes that the sum allocated and the priorities set are quite reasonable. “Still, no sum will suffice if it is just given and not invested in specific projects,” he said. “In that case, it would be impossible to evaluate how effective this federal outlay was.”
Neither the sum nor the means of its delivery were decided on. Khloponin is expected to become the first auditor of the estimated amount and the development of the federal targeted program by the federal authorities depends, to a great extent, on him. “The federal center is ready to provide extensive support for the republic, but this is not a one way street,” Medvedev said, outlining the Kremlin policy. “The kind and scale of support will depend on how well the republic’s government works.”
Kommersant
Banking incomes fall
The income banks generate from corporate lending is not just falling; the rate decline increases every six months, according to statistics from the Russian Central Bank. And though banks are still able to compensate for this fall in income from their main activity, the Russian banking system is approaching the moment when the concepts of survival and consolidation with their rivals become equivalent in the eyes of a number of players, experts warn.
The data on trends in banks’ interest returns and spending on loans were released to the public in the full version of the banking sector review, published on the Russian Central Bank’s website yesterday. The document shows that banks' interest yields from loans to legal entities were 10% less than in the preceding six months. The fall in profit from corporate lending has become an overall market trend, moreover the results of banking activity in the first six months showed a steady drop in interest yields from corporate lending. In the second half of 2009 this decline was only 6 percent on the first half of the year. The reason for this decline was the fall in interest rates on corporate loans from 15 percent per annum in the first half of 2009 to their current 9-10 percent.
Banks are still able to compensate for the falling interest yields from corporate lending. For instance, the interest cost of funds attracted from corporate clients continues to drop. Lending to individuals and bank commissions give the banks a stable income, though they do not make up a large share of the total income.
In fact, the banks are now facing the problems that the Russian Central Bank had warned them about some time ago. During the banking forum in St. Petersburg last spring, First Deputy Chairman of the Russian Central Bank Gennady Melikyan said that the situation in which the margin totals 10-15 percentage points in a number of transactions was a thing of the past. Banks need to think about how they should operate in this new environment. The income of banks’ credit portfolios stands at 10-11 percent, with expenses at 7-9 percent, thus the banks’ profits total 2-3 percent. This figure is unusually small for Russian banks, however experts say that the figure is fine in terms of the global market. Many banks that had foreseen the fall in income from corporate lending at the end of last year tried to resolve the situation by moving to more profitable lending, such as consumer lending and credit cards. However, increased competitiveness in the consumer lending market caused a drop in lending rates, which is why now the banks’ survival potential will depend on their efficiency and the financial opportunities of their owners.
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MOSCOW, August 12 (RIA Novosti)
