Russian Prime Minister Vladimir Putin has instructed VTB Bank, which the government has a 75.5 percent stake in, to pay out more than $500 million to “Mom and Pop” investors who saw their investments in the bank cut by nearly half since a disastrous 2007 initial public offering by the bank.
Russian Prime Minister Vladimir Putin has kicked off his presidential campaign with a vow to end corruption and to create a pro-business, pro-growth economic environment. According to Putin himself, Russia will become one of the best countries for business within the next ten years.
The Russian government is looking to accelerate the country’s economic growth to 6-7 percent annually, with the aim of joining the list of the world’s top five economies in five years.
Russia appears to be playing a dangerous game in its relationships with the US and Central Europe. Moscow’s strategy involves using crises with the United States to create uncertainty in Central Europe and to make the Europeans uncomfortable over perceptions that the United States has forced Russia to act the way it is acting. But, if Moscow takes its aggressive moves too far, it could spark a backlash from both sides.
Influential Russian Finance Minister Alexei Kudrin has departed his post after he went head-to-head with President Dmitri Medvedev during a televised broadcast of a meeting of Russian officials where Medvedev questioned the Finance Minister’s decision to “announce with great pomp” in public recently that he did not intend to work in the new government.
Belarus will receive about $4 billion of duty free oil from Russia in 2011, Russian Prime Minister Vladimir Putin announced this week – Russia will also remove all duties on oil product exports to Kyrgyzstan.
Russia: Use of Energy as Political Tool
Russia is one of the largest producer and exporter of natural gas and oil – and has a history of using energy to its political advantage.
Longtime Moscow Mayor Yuri Luzhkov was fired on Sept. 28 by Russian President Dmitri Medvedev after an 18-year tenure as the mayor of Russia’s capital. The presidential decree firing Luzhkov cited Medvedev’s “loss of trust” in the mayor as the reason for the dismissal, words usually reserved by the Russian government for the most egregious offenses.
Twenty years after the last Russian soldier walked out of Afghanistan,
Moscow is gingerly pushing its way back into the country with business deals and diplomacy, and promises of closer ties to come.
Russia is eager to cooperate on economic matters in part by reviving Soviet-era public works,
its president, Dmitri A. Medvedev, said during a recent summit meeting with the leaders of Afghanistan, Tajikistan and Pakistan,
Prime Minister Vladimir V. Putin banned all exports of grain after millions of acres of Russian wheat withered in a severe drought,
driving up prices around the world and pushing them to their highest level in two years in the United States.
The move was the latest of several abrupt interventions in the Russian economy by Mr. Putin,
who called the ban necessary to curb rising food prices in the country.
The Russian government, which just a few years ago was salting away billions of dollars in oil revenue,
is now confronting such a gaping budget deficit that ministers approved a wide-ranging plan to sell off state property, senior officials said.
It would be, by some estimates, the largest privatization program in Russia since the post-Communist sell-off of the 1990s.
Still, the government plans to sell only minority stakes in the companies,
The leaders of Russia, Belarus and Kazakhstan took their longest stride to date in linking their economies,
forming a customs union that they say will soon evolve into a more ambitious common market, with Russia at its hub.
The agreement, for now, eases trade among the three large former Soviet economies without fully abolishing all duties and tariffs.
The three also stopped short of reaching a common position on membership in the World Trade Organization,
