Nezavisimaya Gazeta
Russian-U.S. military cooperation continues its rapid expansion
Russian Defense Minister Anatoly Serdyukov, due to begin his official visit to the United States Wednesday, plans to discuss various aspects of military reform in both countries, expanded options for military cooperation and crucial global and regional security issues.
Sources in the Russian Defense Ministry say the new format of bilateral military cooperation stipulates far more specific projects and actions than officially announced to date.
Apart from Russian army reform, which is largely modeled on the Pentagon's example, Serdyukov is set to propose closer, more than partner-like relations within the NATO format to the United States and its allies.
Moreover, he will discuss the demarcation of Russian and U.S. spheres of responsibility in Central Asia and the South Caucasus, as well as specific issues regarding the possible deployment of a Russia-NATO missile-defense system against Iran.
Although these initiatives can hardly be called new, the Russian Defense Minister's first official visit to the United States in many years should give them a new lease of life.
This paper has already reported that pro-Kremlin political analysts are seriously discussing Russia's possible accession to NATO. That proposal came from Igor Yurgens, head of the Institute of Contemporary Development, a Moscow-based nonprofit think tank with close ties to the Russian President and his advisors.
Yurgens first voiced this idea on July 28 at a round table discussion in Washington D.C. about the prospects for Russian-U.S. relations. and continued to discuss the issue with Russian and U.S. political analysts at the World Political Forum in Yaroslavl, Central Russia.
Although the Russian Defense Ministry does not take this idea seriously, the Kremlin instructed Serdyukov ahead of his visit to considerably expand bilateral military contacts during his stay in Washington.
Notably, Moscow does not oppose the deployment of larger NATO troop contingents on post-Soviet territory. Russia previously objected to the deployment of U.S. and NATO military bases and installations in Central Asia but is now ready to apportion regional spheres of responsibility with the alliance.
Prime Minister Vladimir Putin said in a recent interview during his trip to Russia's Far East that he saw no indications of resetting Russian-U.S. relations. Putin voiced concern over Washington's rearming of Georgia and U.S. plans to site missile-defense system elements in several European countries.
RBC daily
Businesses cannot count on lower taxes until 2013
Russian businesses told officials what they need for healthy development; the officials promised to relate the ideas to the president. For now, however, businesses were told to be patient and wait.
The annual business forum on modernization opened with a presentation of a long report about what must be done to improve the investment climate in Russia. Along with other policies, the authors insisted on raising taxes on mineral producers and excise taxes on tobacco and alcohol.
The Federal Tax Service responded immediately. Deputy FTS chief, Kirill Yankov, began by praising the business leaders' initiative, and then suggested first asking the mineral producers how they would like it, before raising the extraction tax.
Similar comments came from other attending officials. Deputy Industry and Trade Minister Stanislav Naumov said Russian businesses lacked skills in promoting their end products and services.
Ruslan Guryev, advisor to the Prosecutor General, advised them to aim all the criticism fired at his agency closer to home.
Presidential Aide Arkady Dvorkovich alone offered some support to forum participants - at least moral support if nothing else. He asked those sitting on the panel to write 140-character proposals about improving the investment climate.
It appeared that businesses are in need of personnel, infrastructure, professional consultancy, and mechanisms to implement decisions. They also asked the Interior Ministry to liquidate all economic crime departments, to release all their colleagues serving sentences for less than really grave crimes, and to stop raising social taxes.
Dvorkovich said he would post all the proposals on his Twitter blog and forward them to President Dmitry Medvedev. Later he admitted to reporters that taxes cannot be lowered before 2013.
"I believe that general tax reduction is an issue to be considered in three to five years, that is, after 2013. If we speak about the short-term perspective, we should think more about redistribution of the tax burden rather than tax reduction in general," he said.
He described the proposals to level mineral taxes in the oil and gas industries, to increase excise tax on tobacco and alcohol and the real estate tax as "sensible ideas." However, that was all the support he could offer.
GZT.ru
Opposition parties plan new coalition
Russian opposition parties have announced yet another attempt to join forces for the next parliamentary and presidential elections. The liberals will officially announce a coalition on Thursday. Analysts say the current political situation is favorable, and all they have to do is to select a single presidential candidate.
The organization committee of the new democratic coalition will include Boris Nemtsov, Mikhail Kasyanov, Vladimir Ryzhkov, Sergei Aleksashenko and Ilya Yashin. "Later on, we will hold a broad democratic congress to nominate one presidential candidate from the democrats," a source in the new coalition said.
In early September, reports said that Kasyanov's People's Democratic Union (PDU) party was in talks with Solidarity, led by Nemtsov and Yashin on creating a new opposition party for the next parliamentary election.
Kasyanov said PDU had been denied registration as a political organization, while coalition talks with Sergei Mitrokhin's Yabloko were not successful. Kasyanov on Tuesday confirmed the talks but denied further comment.
The last major attempt to join democratic forces ended in fiasco. In May 2008, several opposition movements formed a National Assembly; its charter was signed by 451 participants from 64 regions. They elected a council, a presidium, a bureau and committees.
The National Assembly was created after the opposition parties failed to nominate candidates for the March 2008 presidential election, when Kasyanov failed to collect the required number of signatures (as stated by the Central Election Commission of Russia) and Garry Kasparov decided against running citing a shortage of funds for the campaign.
Igor Bunin, director of the Center for Political Technology, a Moscow-based think tank, said most of the previous attempts to form a democratic coalition have failed because of leadership infighting. Both Kasparov and Kasyanov claimed leadership of the united party. Another reason was shortage of financial resources, as these politicians indeed lacked the required funds. Finally, few voters had confidence in their coalition.
"It looks like recent liberal trends have generated a hope for an official registration. The fight for leadership must be over too, as Kasparov is no longer mentioned anywhere," he said, adding that the former World Chess Champion has been giving less time to politics and more to chess of late.
Vedomosti
14,000 km of new roads in five years
The Transport Ministry must build 14,000 km of new roads in the next five years, Prime Minister Vladimir Putin told a United Russia party conference on Tuesday. The rapid pace of this construction work will be maintained thanks to a new approach to financing - road funds - which will come into play next year.
The Federal Target Program for Transport Development, approved by Putin two years ago, provides for the construction of only 5,900 km of roads and for the upgrade of another 12,000 km in 2010-2015.
The prime minister was referring to the construction of various kinds of federal and regional roads, including un-tarmaced roads, explained his press-secretary Dmitry Peskov. Since the Program only provides for the construction of asphalt-paved roads, building 14,000 km of hard-surface and dirt roads is feasible, a transport ministry official said. In Siberia and the Far East, for example, roads are badly needed as a general rule, so initially roads of a lower quality could be built and upgraded later. He said that about half the country's regional roads do not have a hard surface.
The main thing is not the number of kilometers but the quality of these kilometers, says Mikhail Blinkin, head of research at the Research and Development Institute of Transport and Road Economy. China, he said, has long since stopped counting the kilometers comprising its local or regional road networks, reporting only the construction of expressways, which runs at a rate of 5,000 to 6,000 km per year. Since the mid-1990s, China has built about 70,000 km of multi-lane highways. In Russia, the road network has not shown any increase over the past few years at all, Blinkin said, which means there are a dwindling number of roads: some fall out of use with time.
In 2009-2010, due to a sharp fall in budget financing, practically no new roads were built, the official said. The 1,200 km of federal highways that were brought into service were almost all upgraded sections of existing roads. In 2009, road building fell 70%, revealed Svetlana Vorontsova, deputy general director of the Transport Infrastructure Institute.
Re-establishing the road funds will help the road building sector financially, but will not radically improve the road situation in Russia, Blinkin said: a tremendous amount of money is required - up to 1.5 trillion rubles a year - and raising such a sum would require increasing gasoline prices by one quarter. This is a political decision, but the government is unlikely to take such a step, he said.
BFM.ru
Court forces Berezovsky to return over $52 million to Aeroflot
The Russian national flag carrier Aeroflot has received over $52 million previously embezzled by disgraced oligarch Boris Berezovsky and his accomplices, after a Swiss court ruled they should return the company's foreign-currency revenue.
The Russian Prosecutor-General's Office said the money had been frozen in the accounts of Swiss company Andava, co-founded by Berezovsky to service the airline's hard-currency income, eleven years ago after a criminal case was opened.
If this is the case, my client and other defendants no longer owe anything to the airline according to Russian court verdicts, said Berezovsky's lawyer, Andrei Borovkov.
In January 1999, the Russian Prosecutor-General's Office opened a criminal case against Berezovsky and other individuals for crimes against Aeroflot property.
A subsequent investigation revealed that Berezovsky was assisted by his co-conspirators namely, the airline's former top-managers, including former deputy CEO for finance Nikolai Glushkov, commercial director Alexander Krasnenker, chief accountant Lidia Kryzhevskaya and Roman Sheinin, head of the United Financial Corporation.
A press release posted the Prosecutor General's Office website said that Berezovsky and his accomplices had embezzled 53 million Swiss francs (about $52.2 million) pending the opening of the case.
From 1999 Andava and the defendants had their Swiss bank accounts frozen on instructions from the Prosecutor General's Office.
In July 2008, the Federal Criminal Court of Switzerland found former Andava director, Swiss citizen Hans-Peter Jenny, guilty of complicity in embezzlement and gave him a 21-month suspended sentence, also ordering him to pay daily 1,000-franc fines for a period of 90 days.
On July 7, 2010, after the verdicts on the Berezovsky and Jenny cases entered into force, the Federal Supreme Court of Switzerland ruled that these assets be returned to their rightful owner. On August 27, a transfer of $52.2 million was made into Aeroflot's account at the Russian Commercial Bank.
The company confirmed receipt of the sum.
The Prosecutor-General's Office has other far-reaching plans and is moving to exact another 60 billion un-redenominated rubles ($1.95 billion) from Berezovsky and his associates. Assets worth that were embezzled from Russia's largest automaker AvtoVAZ.
In June 2009, Berezovsky was sentenced in absentia to 11 years by Moscow Region's Krasnogorsk town court for the theft of 5,500 cars from AvtoVAZ. This was the second prison sentence he has received. In total, the court sentenced him to 13 years on various counts.
Yuly Dubov, then CEO of LogoVAZ, the main dealer for Russia's popular Lada cars, who has also been resident in the United Kingdom for many years, was sentenced in absentia to nine years in prison.
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MOSCOW, September 15 (RIA Novosti)
