Communist Tax Lawyer

A great write up on the recent gas dispute between Russia and Belarus, from TIME:

It is becoming a New Year’s tradition in Europe to wake up on January 1 with a big Russian headache. At the beginning of 2006 and 2009, Russia cut off energy supplies to Ukraine after a disagreement over natural gas prices, which subsequently caused fuel shortages in the European Union in the dead of winter. This January, all eyes are trained on Belarus, which has been having its own quarrel with Moscow over oil prices, threatening European energy supplies once again. But three weeks into the current standoff, there’s been a twist: Kazakhstan, another ex-Soviet republic, stepped in last week to offer Belarus its own oil. Now the Kremlin’s most reliable tool for controlling its neighbors — energy blackmail — is at risk of blowing up in its face. Read the rest of this entry »

Russia and the United States are “95 percent” agreed on the terms of a disarmament treaty that would see the two largest nuclear powers each reduce their stockpile of nuclear warheads to between 1,500 and 1,675. The treaty would also reduce the number of vehicles capable of carrying these warheads to between 500 and 1,100.

“Everything in negotiations is going fine, 95 percent of the new deal’s issues have been agreed upon,” said Russian President Dmitry Medvedev, according to Russian news agencies on Sunday. Read the rest of this entry »

Former Ukrainian Prime Minister Viktor Yanukovich is close to realizing a political comeback after his controversial loss to Viktor Yushchenko in the 2004 presidential election, which was marred with charges of corruption and fraud.

Riding a wave of widespread discontent with the Orange Revolution, recent polls show Yanukovich leading in the presidential polls ahead of current Ukrainian Prime Minister Yulia Tymoshenko going into the first round of voting this Sunday.

“Together, we have suffered through this Orange nightmare,” Mr. Yanukovich said at a recent rally in Dneprodzerzhinsk. “Let us consign this history to the black pages of our lives.”

Recent opinion polls have Mr. Yanukovich between 25 to 33 percent, Ms. Tymoshenko between 15 to 18 percent, and incumbent President Viktor Yushchenko at a mere three percent.

Yanukovich, whose image as a Kremlin lackey cost him votes in 2006, hopes to repair relations with Russia if elected, which have been strained of late as a result of President Yushchenko’s attempt to gain NATO membership.

“We do not want to join any military bloc,” Mr. Yanukovich has said regarding NATO membership.

“Relations should be natural, as they are between the Ukrainian people and the Russian people. They must be friendly, they must be pragmatic, they must be strategic.”

The Nevsky Express, an express train en route from Moscow to St. Petersburg, was derailed Friday night near the town of Bologoye by what is believed to be a homemade bomb.

As of Monday morning, there have been 26 confirmed deaths and more than 50 people are still hospitalized.

The explosion, which is reported to have been roughly the equivalent of 7kg of TNT, is currently under investigation by Russian officials as a terrorist attack.

Even as the Russia military is flexing its growing muscles, the economy continues to shrink. It what may seem like a return to the heydays of the Soviet Union, the Russian economy contracted in the last quarter as rising unemployment sapped consumer demand, bank lending stalled and the government was slow to respond with support measures.

Bloomberg reported that gross domestic product contracted an annual 10.9 percent in the second quarter, the Federal Statistics Service said in an e- mailed statement today, citing preliminary data. The median estimate in a Bloomberg survey of seven economists was for output to shrink 10.2 percent. GDP expanded 7.5 percent from the previous quarter. The service’s data go as far back as 1995.

China, India  and Russia are increasingly calling for a rethink of how global currency reserves are composed and managed, underlining a power shift to emerging markets from the developed nations that spawned the financial crisis.

“There should be a system to maintain the stability of the major reserve currencies,” Bloomberg reported former Chinese Vice Premier Zeng Peiyan as saying in a speech in Beijing.

Leaders from China and India are preparing to join their counterparts from the Group of Eight industrialized nations – the United States, Japan, Germany, Britain, France, Italy, Canada and Russia – at a summit in Italy next week. In addition to China and India, Brazil will also send representatives to the summit.

Emerging markets continue to remain dependent on the U.S. dollar, thanks in part to the United States’ status as the world’s largest economy and a US$2.5 trillion export market. Shares of dollars in global foreign- exchange reserves increased to 65 percent in the first three months of this year, the highest since 2007 according to the IMF.

China and Russia are stepping up communication as relations between the two neighboring countries continues to improve.

Chinese Foreign Ministry spokesman Qin Gang Thursday praised his country’s relations with its giant neighbor, Russia. China is willing to “join hands” with Russia Qin said, especially against the backdrop of what he describes as the “complicated international situation.” Read the rest of this entry »

In a statement that sounds good but never has a real chance of happening, former president and current Russian Prime Minister Vladimir Putin said that his nation would give up nuclear weapons if everybody else who had them did the same.

“If those who made the atomic bomb and used it are ready to abandon it, along with – I hope – other nuclear powers that officially or unofficially possess it, we will of course welcome and facilitate this process in every possible way,” Putin said.

Russian and American officials are currently negotiating a successor to the 1991 Start Treaty which banned its signatories from deploying more than 6,000 nuclear warheads atop a total of 1,600 ICBMs, submarine-launched ballistic missiles, and bombers. Read the rest of this entry »

U.S. retail giant Wal-Mart siad on thursday that they are “confident and hopeful” about entering the Russian market.

According to MarketWatch, the company set up an office in that country a year ago to study the market and explore opportunities.

Wal-Mart’s international unit covers 15 markets, from Brazil and Mexico to China and Japan in addition to Puerto Rico, generates a quarter of the company’s sales (about US$100 billion), and has been the fastest growing division of the company. In the past five years, the international unit has seen an annual sales growth rate of 17 percent.

NASA announced this week that it extended its contract with the Russian Federal Space Agency Roscosmos. With the space shuttle scheduled to retire from service next year, NASA is in need of the crew and heavy lifting capabilities that the Russian’s can provide to support the International Space Station.

According to NASA’s website, the new deal includes “comprehensive Soyuz support, including all necessary training and preparation for launch, crew rescue, and landing of a long-duration mission for six individual station crew members.” The US$306 million deal will involve four launches by the Roscosmos Soyuz program.

NASA and Russia previously agreed to a US$719 million deal in 2007 that included 15 seats and 5.6 tons of cargo to be transported on Soyuz flights to the orbital site Russian news agency RIA Novosti reports.