Windows to Russia

The Russian Investigative Committee has failed to file formal tax evasion charges against Hermitage Capital head William Browder because he did not show up for questioning, a spokeswoman said on Thursday.

“If he fails to appear again, action will be taken to establish his whereabouts and enforce his presence,” committee spokeswoman Irina Dudukina said.

U.S.-born Browder, who is a British citizen, is suspected of underpaying more than 2 billion rubles ($72 million) in back taxes.

He was once one of the most successful Western investors in Moscow but was expelled from Russia in 2005 for national security reasons and now lives in Britain.

Dudukina said there were no impediments to Browder’s entry into Russia and he could easily receive a visa if he applied.

According to some media reports Russia will seek Browder’s extradition and prosecute him in absentia if Britain refuses.

Hermitage Capital has been in the focus of a controversial tax evasion case that led to the death in custody of lawyer Sergei Magnitsky in 2009.

Magnitsky was jailed in 2008 after being charged with tax evasion linked to his defense of Hermitage Capital.

The lawyer accused Russian tax and Interior Ministry officials of using documents seized form Hermitage’s subsidiaries to register their own people as owners and directors and file a false tax claim to embezzle $230 million.

He died aged 37 from acute heart failure after 11 months in a Moscow pre-trial detention facility.

Magnitsky was kept in appalling conditions and was refused crucial medical treatment in what Hermitage says was an effort to coerce him to admit his role in its alleged tax evasion.

MOSCOW, May 12 (RIA Novosti)

We have been having a great time in Odessa Ukraine. The weather has been just about perfect and the sights we have been seeing are really cool…

We have stayed in a flat near the Black Sea. It was very nice and the price is right due to off season. We could walk to the sea and we found some wonderful French cafe’s…

Odessa is a neat seaport that is a melting pot of a million people. We spent Victory Day at the Odessa Seaport. It was a really interesting day and we got to listen to several concerts that played music from the old days…

I finally found a good WiFi spot and decided to catch the blog up on items. Sorry about the inactivity but sometimes internet is a little hard to come by…

Tonight (Wednesday) we leave on a train bac to Kiev. It is time to get my visa and go hoe to Moscow Russia…

Sveta and I have had a blast in Odessa…

See you soon…

Kyle and Sveta
Windows to Russia!

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Russian President Dmitry Medvedev has dismissed another four Interior Ministry generals, the Kremlin press service said on Saturday.

Some 3,000,000 people took part in Victory Day celebrations in Moscow, the Russian capital’s police spokesman Viktor Biryukov said.

Victory Day that Russia celebrates on May 9 marks the final defeat of Nazi Germany by the Soviet Union in World War II, known in Russia as the Great Patriotic War. This year, the 66th anniversary of the Soviet victory was marked.

“No serious incidents were registered,” Biryukov said, adding that 20,000 police officers ensured order on city streets. “No one was detained.”

A military parade was held on Red Square in the morning. The event involved 20,000 servicemen and cadets, as well as a march pass of over 100 pieces of military hardware.

The hardware included Topol-M ballistic missile launchers, S-400 Triumph air defense systems, Pantsyr-S1 air defense systems, Iskander-M missile launchers, Smerch multiple rocket launchers, BTR-80 armored personnel carriers, and T-90 main battle tanks.

Russian President Dmitry Medvedev addressed the participants and guests at the beginning of the parade.

The day culminated in a grand fireworks display consisting of 30 salvos from 18 guns and 72 launchers.

Over 250,000 people participated in Victory Day celebrations in the Moscow Region that surrounds the Russian capital, regional police spokesman Yevgeny Gildeyev said.

He said no incidents were reported and no one was detained, and added that 6,400 police officers ensured law and order.

Victory Day celebrations also took place in cities across Russia and in former Soviet states.

MOSCOW, May 10 (RIA Novosti)

Our duty is to safeguard peace achieved by the victory in the 1941-45 war against Nazi Germany, Russian President Dmitry Medvedev said at a military parade in Moscow on Monday.

The military parade dedicated to the 66th anniversary of the Soviet victory in the Great Patriotic War was launched on Moscow’s Red Square at 10:00 a.m. Moscow time (06:00 GMT) and continued for about an hour.

“The duty of our generation is to safeguard peace achieved by the Victory,” Medvedev said, adding that the modernization and development of the Armed Forces remains a key priority for the Russian leadership.

Russian Prime Minister Vladimir Putin and Defense Minister Anatoly Serdyukov also attended the parade.

The parade involved a march pass of about 20,000 servicemen and cadets. The troops wore new-style field uniforms, introduced in the Russian Armed Forces this year.

Two hundred elite officers from Russia’s Space Forces marched on Red Square for the first time in history of the Victory Day parades.

The event also involves a march pass of over 100 pieces of military hardware, including Topol-M ballistic missile launchers, S-400 Triumph air defense systems, Pantsyr-S1 air defense systems, Iskander-M missile launchers, Smerch multiple rocket launchers, BTR-80 armored personnel carriers, and T-90 main battle tanks.

The parade culminated with a flyover by a group of five Mi-8 multirole helicopters carrying Russian state and military flags.

The first Victory Parade was held on Red Square on June 24, 1945 on the order of the then-Supreme Commander-in-Chief, Joseph Stalin.

According to latest studies, the total causalities of the Soviet Union, both soldiers and civilians, were 26.6 million people, of those an estimated 8,668,400 soldiers died.

MOSCOW, May 9 (RIA Novosti)

President Dmitry Medvedev suggested on Tuesday that Russia should consider introducing chemical castration as a punishment for criminals guilty of sexual offences against children.

“Punishments should be as harsh as possible. The state should use all means possible, and a liberal approach here is totally unacceptable,” Medvedev said at a meeting on the development of the legal system.

“I suggest discussion of measures including medical procedures for such individuals, including injections that would block the action of their hormones,” the president said.

Chemical castration of pedophiles is used in a number of countries and consists of a series of regular chemical injections that block the effects of the male hormone testosterone.

Medvedev highlighted the importance of measures to protect children in his annual address to the nation in November 2010, saying that protecting children vital for the future of Russian society.

GORKY, May 10 (RIA Novosti)

Russian news websites are morally wrong to show a video of a sexual assault on a St. Petersburg schoolboy, but there is no legal basis to demand they remove the clip, a local children’s rights official said on Tuesday.

Local news agency BaltInfo said several high school pupils raped a 13-year old boy with the handle of a shovel “under the pretext of returning a non-existent debt” and posted a video of their act on the internet. The video was later released by some St. Petersburg media with the faces of the pupils obscured and a message warning that it was not recommended viewing.

St. Petersburg’s ombudswoman for children’s rights, Svetlana Agipova, has demanded that the video be withdrawn, a spokesman said, but there is no legal case to force media to remove it from their websites.

“Some media have widely disseminated the video,” the spokesman said. “Svetlana Yuriyevna [Agipova] believes that this is absolutely unacceptable.”

“She urges journalists not to duplicate [the video], and remove the video, which contains scenes of violence, dealing with real people, from their websites,” he said, adding that with no law against showing the footage, the children’s rights watchdog could only issue the call to remove the video on moral grounds.

The spokesman said all the defendants in the case are teenagers who have not attained the age of criminal responsibility.

St. Petersburg media said that teachers of the school may have known about the incident but did not inform police.

The investigation is continuing.

ST. PETERSBURG, May 10 (RIA Novosti) 

Moscow said on Tuesday it expected Kiev to punish the Ukrainian nationalists who disrupted Victory Day celebrations in Lvov and attacked Russian diplomats.

Members of the Ukrainian Svoboda (Freedom) nationalist organization on May 9 engaged in a brawl with WWII veterans, tore and burnt Soviet flags, and trod on a wreath that the Russian consul general in Lvov, Oleg Astakhov, planned to lay at the tombs of Soviet soldiers who died while liberating Ukraine from Nazi Germany.

Ukrainian nationalists claim that Ukraine suffered identically from both Hitler’s Germany and Stalin’s Soviet Union.

“We expect that those guilty will be found by local law enforcement agencies and receive the punishment that they deserve, and that similar situations will be excluded from the practice of bilateral relations,” Russian Foreign Ministry’s spokesman Alexander Lukashevich said.

“It is a crude violation of basic human rights, including those stipulated by the European Human Rights Convention,” the official said.

Ukrainian President Viktor Yanukovych warned nationalists on Monday against attempts to sow discord in society and said that the government would “respond” to such actions.

MOSCOW, May 10 (RIA Novosti)

A Pacific Fleet task force led by the Admiral Vinogradov destroyer has completed a friendly visit to Vietnam and is now heading for the Far Eastern port of Vladivostok.

The Admiral Vinogradov destroyer, accompanied by a salvage tug and the Pechenga tanker, has paid a friendly visit to the Vietnamese port city of Da Nang while returning from an anti-piracy mission in the Gulf of Aden.

“The departure ceremony in Da Nang ended at 6 am Moscow time [2:00 GMT] on Wednesday, and the task force, headed home,” a spokesman for the Pacific Fleet said.

During its four-month anti-piracy mission, which ended on April 17, the ship escorted 14 convoys of civil vessels through pirate-infested waters off the Horn of Africa.

The Russian Navy has maintained a presence off the Horn of Africa since October 2008, with warships operating on a rotation basis.

VLADIVOSTOK, May 11 (RIA Novosti)

Russian President Dmitry Medvedev has signed a 2009 nuclear cooperation agreement with Turkey that would boost energy projects between the two countries, the Kremlin said on Saturday.

The deal, approved by Russia’s parliament last month, was one of several agreements struck by Russian Prime Minister Vladimir Putin on a visit to Ankara in August 2009.

Last year, Russia and Turkey signed $20 billion agreement under which Russia would help build and operate Turkey’s first nuclear power plant.

Speaking on a visit to Moscow in March, Turkish Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan said the plant would be an “example for the rest of the world” in terms of safety and transparency in nuclear emergencies.

There have been renewed concerns about the safety of nuclear power generation after the radiation leak crisis at Japan’s Fukushima Daiichi nuclear plant that was badly damaged by an earthquake and tsunami on March 11.

MOSCOW, May 7 (RIA Novosti)