Anastasiya Khabenskaya, a radio journalist and actress married to popular Russian actor Konstantin Khabensky, died from a brain tumor in Los Angeles this week. Mrs. Khabenskaya developed the tumor in 2007, while pregnant with the couple's only son, Ivan. She was treated in the best hospitals in Moscow and Los Angeles. The couple reportedly celebrated a simple, private Russian Orthodox wedding before Khabenskaya passed away this week, surrounded by her husband and mother.

A 36 year-old native of St. Petersburg, Russia and a former electrical engineering student turned street musician, Konstantin Khabensky is best known to American audiences for his role in the Angelina Jolie action-adventure movie Wanted. Russians know him best as the star of Admiral (Kolchak), The Irony of Fate 2 (Ironi Sudbi 2), Night Watch (Nochnoy Dozor), Day Watch (Dnevnoy Dozor) and other Russian blockbusters.

Click here to read the story in Russian at the RIA Novosti website. Click on the extended post to read Konstantin Khabensky's biography from the IMDB website:

He was born Konstantin Yuryevich Khabensky on January 11, 1972, in Leningrad, USSR (now St. Petersburg, Russia). His father, Yuri Khabensky, and his mother, Tatiana Gennadievna (nee Nikulina), were engineers-hydrologists. Young Konstantin Khabensky studied electronics at the Leningrad Technical School of Aviation Electronics and Automatics. He dropped out on the third year after deciding that electronics was not for him.

He played guitar on the Nevsky Prospect as a struggling street musician, then was a stage technician at the Theatre-Studio "Subbota" in Leningrad. From 1990 to 1995 Khabensky studied acting at the St. Peterburg Institute of Theater, Music and Cinematography. There his classmates were Mikhail Porechenkov, Andrei Zibrov, and Mikhail Trukhin. In 1995, Khabensky graduated from the class of Veniamin Filshtinsky, as an actor. He had a five-month stint at the Raikin's Theatre of Satire in Moscow, but there he was deprived of any serious work, so he returned to St. Petersburg.

Khabensky made his film debut in Na Kogo Bog Poschlet (1994). He shot to fame in Russia after co-starring in "Uboynaya sila" (2000), a popular series about crime in St. Petersburg, Russia. Khabensky ascended to international fame with the leading role as Anton in the popular Russian vampire franchise, Nochnoy Dozor (2004), and the second installment, Dnevnoy Dozor (2006), by director Timur Bekmambetov and based on eponymous books by Sergei Lukyanenko.

From 1996 to 2003 Khabensky was a member of the troupe at the St. Petersburg Theatre of Lensovet. There he worked together with his former classmates Mikhail Porechenkov, Mikhail Trukhin and Andrei Zibrov under directorship of Yuri Butusov. In 2003 Khabensky and Porechenkov were invited by Oleg Tabakov to work with the Moscow Art Theatre. There Khabensky has been playing the leading role in "White Guard", a classic play by Mikhail A. Bulgakov. He also appeared as Claudius in the Shakespeare's "Hamlet" directed by Yuri Butusov.

Khabensky made appearances on stage at the St. Petersburg Theatre of Lensovet in the leading role in a contemporary play 'V ozhidanii Godo', and as Kaligula in the eponymous play by Albert Camus.

Konstantin Khabensky has been married to radio-journalist Anastasiya Khabenskaya. He has homes in both Russian capitals: Moscow and St. Petersburg.

Khabensky as Anton Gorodetsky, the flawed hero of Day Watch

Khabensky lived in Moscow, his hometown of St. Petersburg, and Los Angeles, where he and his frequent director and collaborator Timur Bekmambetov filmed Wanted and were reportedly working on the third installment in the dozori trilogy, Twilight Watch

In August 1980, a new film was released in the Soviet Union, shattering any blockbuster records in the USSR and becoming an iconic feat of Soviet cinematography - "Pirati 20 Veka» (Пираты XX Века) – (20th Century Pirates). This was the first domestically produced "boyevik" - an action thriller - and it became an instant and long-lasting success.

The film, almost three-decades old, has the feel of being "ripped off the headlines." Today's Russia is taking an active role in combat international piracy off the coast of Somalia. Its Navy is participating in protection, search and destroy missions, and along with its American and British counterparts, and has already enjoyed limited success.

"20th Century Pirates" literally exploded on the domestic scene - the film had a very "un-Soviet" look to it. 'Till that time, the action thriller style has been a solely Western monopoly, and films with chases, explosions, gun fights, outright violence and international intrigue - all taking place in exotic locations - were never before produced in the USSR.

The film plot could have been taken from today's newspapers - or from the headlines 30 years ago. A Soviet tanker with a large load of opium for the pharmaceutical industry is leaving a South Asian port through the Straits of Malacca. Shortly afterward, its crew picks up a shipwreck survivor. All was not what it seemed - the actor playing the survivor was "Soviet Bruce Lee"- Talgat Nigmatulin, a USSR martial arts champion. His character secretly destroys the ships' communication equipment as the Russian ship is suddenly attacked by what appeared to be large luxury yacht passing nearby. Most Soviet crew dies in a violent gun battle with the well-armed pirates. The opium is transferred on the pirate ship, while the Soviet vessel is sunk. However, a few crew members manage to survive and decide to track down and exact revenge on the pirates. The Soviet survivors make their way to the pirate hideout, somewhere amidst numerous islands near the Indonesian archipelago. There, the real action starts.

The film thrilled the Soviet moviegoers of all ages. Practically every teenager in the USSR in the 1980s has seen the film at least several times. According to official data, every third person in the USSR managed to see the film in its year of release. With repeat viewers, that number reached almost 100 million people. After the first screening of the film for the state censorship agency in the Central Communist Party Committee of the USSR, the film was "cursed out" and almost shelved. The probable reason was the movie's very "American" look and absence of any real Communist propaganda of any type.

However, one of the agency's officials took the matters into his own hands and sent the copy of the film to the summer home of Leonid Brezhnev, then leader of the Soviet Union. Brezhnev got very excited after watching the action thriller, and shortly afterward the film was released country-wide. That year, Soviet officials often had to cancel morning showings, since students of all ages would skip school just to watch the film.

"20th Century Pirates" remains the highest-grossing and most-attended film for the entire 70 years of Soviet cinema. Not surprisingly, it still looks modern even today. And while some parts of it now may seem "campy," it is still relevant to today's global events, when every week, newspapers report of yet another international vessel captured by the Somali pirates, prompting US, European or Russian naval vessels to give chase. It would not be surprising that a sequel to the Soviet film is somewhere in the works or is on the drawing map in Hollywood- after all, the story simply writes itself.

A clip from the movie (action part)

This article originally appeared in Real Clear Politics

During the 2008 presidential campaign, Republicans urged the Democrat majority in the U.S. Congress to allow American oil companies to "drill here, drill now, pay less" amidst record gasoline prices. One of the claims Republicans made was that the federal ban on offshore oil drilling, particularly off the coast of Florida, was ridiculous because Cuba had already leased drilling rights to Chinese companies. Thus, Chinese firms would be drilling nearly 90 miles off the coast of the U.S., while American laws would prevent American oil majors from doing the same.

At that time, Democrats dismissed these GOP claims about Chinese drilling as apocryphal, and said that China hadn't drilled for any oil in or around Cuba and that more domestic drilling wouldn't reduce gasoline prices for consumers at the pump. Later on during the campaign, as gasoline prices peaked in July 2008 and U.S. public opinion polls shifted decisively in favor of drilling, the Democrat majority in Congress allowed the long-time drilling ban to slip. Nonetheless, Florida and other states retained their bans on offshore oil and gas development.

One wonders if the news Sunday that Russian oil majors are also considering development in the Gulf of Mexico will affect the debate over drilling in the Florida legislature and on Capitol Hill. The announcement by a Russian diplomat came ahead of President Dimitry Medvedev's state visit to Havana, part of a presidential tour planned through Latin America.

President-elect Barack Obama's spokesman John Podesta has already announced that Obama will review several Bush-era executive orders, including the President's recent decision to abrogate the previous President Bush's 1990 executive order that banned offshore oil drilling. Lower gasoline prices due to the global economic slowdown (and some analysts claim, the bursting of a speculative bubble in commodities) has reduced the pressure on Democrats to allow drilling -- for now. But one wonders whether China, Russia, India and other rising economic powers will have much interest in joining a U.S. and Western European-led carbon "cap and trade" scheme, the favorite policy of House Speaker Nancy Pelosi and other leading Democrats, to reduce worldwide CO2 emissions that may contribute to global warming.

Click on the extended post to read excerpts from the Associated Press story.

Official: Russians want to search for oil off Cuba

HAVANA – Russian oil companies could soon begin searching for oil in deep Gulf of Mexico waters off Cuba, a top diplomat said just days before Russian President Dmitry Medvedev visits the island.

Russian oil companies have "concrete projects" for drilling in Cuba's part of the gulf, said Mijail Kamynin, Russia's ambassador to Cuba, to the state-run business magazine Opciones.

Kamynin also said Russian companies would like to help build storage tanks for crude oil and to modernize Cuban pipelines, as well as play a role in Venezuelan efforts to refurbish a Soviet-era refinery in the port city of Cienfuegos, according the article published this weekend.

Medvedev comes to former Cold War ally Cuba on Thursday, part of a tour of Latin America to strengthen his country's economic and political ties in the region. Kamynin said trade between Russia and the island would top $400 million this year.

Washington's nearly 50-year-old trade embargo prohibits U.S. companies from investing on the island. But Cuba's state-run oil concern has signed joint operating agreements with companies from several countries to explore waters that Cuban scientists claim could contain reserves of up to 20 billion barrels of oil.

Brazilian President Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva visited Cuba in October for the signing of agreements allowing state-run Petroleo Brasileiro SA to invest $8 million initially for a seven-year, deep-water exploration project north of the famed beach resort of Varadero. If reserves are confirmed, Brazil would produce oil and natural gas recovered there over the next 25 years.

Go to the Associated Press website to read the rest of this story.

The Russian Navy announced yesterday that it is sending another warship to the Indian Ocean to protect surface shipping from pirates. The Russian frigate is being dispatched after pirate gangs based in Somalia seized a supertanker near the Horn of Africa. The Sirius Star, a Saudi-flagged supertanker carrying two million barrels of crude, was seized this week by pirates operating nearly 500 miles off the coast of eastern Africa.

The Star is one of the largest vessels of its kind in the world, roughly the size of a U.S. aircraft carrier, and is manned by a 25-man multinational crew. Somali pirates are demanding millions in ransom money to release the ship and its crew. Unless their demands are met within ten days, the pirates have threatened to harm the crewmembers and hinted at causing a catastrophic oil spill. The Somali pirates are employing not only the traditional cigarette speedboats to attack merchantmen close to the coast, but also "mother ships", GPS devices and satellite phones that can extend their reach hundreds of miles offshore.

Click on the extended post to read more.

Russia's Navy already tangled with the East African pirates earlier this year, when Somali gangs attempted to seize a Danish-flagged cargo ship in the Indian Ocean. Russia dispatched the frigate Neustrashimy to the Indian Ocean after the Faina, a Ukrainian-flagged freighter carrying tanks and heavy weaponry, was seized by Somali pirates on September 25. The pirates are demanding a $5-million ransom in exchange for the release of the Ukrainian and Russian crewmembers. The Indian Navy also reported this week that it sank a pirate "mother ship" on the high seas when the pirates threatened to attack the frigate INS Tabar. The Tabar was built by Russians in a St. Petersburg shipyard and exported to India.

As the world's second largest oil exporter after Saudi Arabia, Russia clearly has a strong interest in protecting tankers on the high seas. Russia has also pursued closer ties to Middle Eastern governments in recent years, and therefore has an additional incentive to protect its Gulf Arab partners. The Sirius Star is a Saudi-flagged vessel and the Saudis are reportedly negotiating with the hijackers before resorting to force. Around 20,000 merchant ships pass through the waters east of Africa and south of the Arabian peninsula every year, making the area a strategic crossroads between Europe, Africa, and Asia.

After hundreds of hijackings or attacks this year, the international community is beginning to take the threat of piracy seriously and is fed up with the pirates and their arrogant demands. The European Union has created the first anti-piracy flotilla in its history, while Russian, French, British, Indian and American warships and marines are already patrolling the East African coast. The United Nations passed a new resolution calling for travel and economic sanctions against Somali officials, even though Somalia currently has no central government to sanction.

Unfortunately, Somalia is best known to Americans as the site of the notorious Battle of Mogadishu, which took the lives of 19 American servicemen. The 24-hour firefight was depicted in the bestselling book by journalist Mark Bowden, Black Hawk Down, and the 2001 Ridley Scott film of the same title. Many Somalis complained that the Hollywood production depicted their countrymen as trigger-happy savages and got many facts wrong, including tragic American errors that led to the deaths of Somali civilians.

Since American and United Nations forces pulled out in 1994, Somalia has been plagued by tribal violence and the widespread threat of starvation. After 9/11, the son of the warlord Mohammed Fara Aidid, whose militia fought U.S. Army Rangers and Delta force commandos in 1993, reportedly asked the Americans for help against tribal enemies he claimed were harboring members of Al-Qaeda. U.S. Marines and French Foreign Legion troops are currently based within striking distance of Somalia, in the tiny state of Djibouti, and continue to raid Somali territory to hunt down suspected Al-Qaeda members. Meanwhile, Somali gangs have become increasingly bold as millions of dollars in ransom payments have trickled into Puntland and other regions, allowing the pirates to bribe officials and making them folk heroes to many local tribesmen.

Once again, just as in the weeks immediately following 9/11, it appears that the U.S. and Russia are facing a common set of terrorist and criminal adversaries striking out at the civilized world from lawless regions. It remains to be seen if recognition of this fact will bring the U.S., Russia, India and the Europeans closer together in cooperation. While the dispute over a U.S. missile defense system in Poland and the Czech Republic continues to create trans-Atlantic headlines, last week Russia announced that Germany would be permitted to ship weapons to NATO troops in Afghanistan using the Russian railway system. As the situation on the ground continues to deteriorate in Pakistan, where many tribal regions are loyal to the Taliban, Russia may prove to be a vital logistical lifeline for NATO in Central Asia.

Newsweek Interactive, the consulting firm A.T. Kearney and the Chicago Council on Global Affairs have published an index of the world's top global cities in the Nov/Dec 2008 issue of Foreign Policy magazine. The FP is a publication of the Washington-D.C. based Carnegie Endowment for International Peace.

According to the A.T. Kearney survey, a global city is defined as an urban center that "excels across multiple dimensions" of human achievement, with different rankings for leading cities in business, finance, education, and governance. Some cities came off better in the rankings due to their historic position as global economic hubs, such as New York, London, and Tokyo, while others offered more lifestyle attractions, such as Toronto and Los Angeles. But all of the established megacities in the developed world have increasing competition from emerging market boomtowns like Beijing, Bangalore, Sao Paulo, and Shenzhen. As the capital of the Russian Federation, Moscow found its spot in the combined rankings at #19 out of 60 global cities, situated in between Vienna and Shanghai.

Click on the extended post to read more.

Moscow scored highest on "the best cities to get culture" ranking, at no. 6, and no. 15 on "the best cities to get a degree". While the cultural category may seem subjective, depending on one's definition of culture, the educational rankings are based on objective criteria such as the percentage of inhabitants with university degrees, and the number of international students, international schools, and top global universities in each city. Moscow State University (MSU) and other institutions in the Russian capital have attracted large numbers of foreign students, particularly in engineering and medical sciences.

In recent years Moscow's retail, industrial, service and construction industries have drawn thousands of expats from Europe and hundreds of thousands of migrants from Russian regions to the city. According to the 2006 census, the number of legally registered residents in Moscow city limits exceeded 10.4 million people. The actual population, including undocumented workers from the former Soviet republics, could be substantially higher. The Moscow region surrounding the city has 6 million inhabitants.

Of cities ranked by A.T. Kearney in the U.S., New York (still no. 1 in spite of the financial crisis), Los Angeles (6), Chicago (8), Washington (11), and San Francisco (15) scored the highest in the overall rankings.

You can read more about the methodology A.T. Kearney used to generate their rankings here. Click on the photos section of Russia Blog to view more photos of the Russian capital.

The International Herald Tribune has done some of the best reporting about Russia in recent months, including C.J. Chivers recently published analysis questioning many initial reports from the August 2008 war in Georgia. The Georgia War revealed that the Russian military still has sharp teeth - at least when fighting an inferior opponent on its own borders.

However, the war also revealed that even the Russian Army's elite formations were fielding 1980s vintage equipment, and did not have night vision goggles or Global Positioning System (GPS) devices like some of their Georgian opponents. The lack of unmanned aerial vehicles also led to a Russian Air Force Tupolev bomber getting shot down on a routine reconaissance mission over Georgia, with the loss of the entire crew. Russian army commanders, like the Georgian President Mikheil Saakashvili, were reduced to issuing battlefield orders over easily intercepted cellphone lines due to a shortage of secure radios.

In late October the IHT reported on large Russian military exercises then taking place across all eleven time zones of Russia, complete with ICBM tests (hat tip: former Sovietologist and blogger Thomas P.M. Barnett). The IHT added that most American officials in the Pentagon and Bush Administration considered these changes in the Russian military's organization to be routine and not a cause for alarm in the West. If anything, President Medvedev's ambitious plans to modernize the armed forces may have to be scaled back due to a weak ruble, falling oil prices, and declining tax revenues into the Russian federal budget.

Click on the extended post to read an excerpt from the IHT article. Click on the Human Rights section of Russia Blog to read more about the problems of brutal hazing (dedovshina) and low morale in the Russian army.

Russia striving to modernize military, U.S. notes with interest, not alarm
By Thom Shanker
Monday, October 20, 2008

WASHINGTON: As they tracked Russian military maneuvers in recent days, the American government's career Kremlin-watchers might have been forgiven for wondering if they were seeing recycled newsreels from the worst of the bad old days.

A huge exercise, called Stability 2008, spread tens of thousands of troops, thousands of vehicles and scores of combat aircraft across nearly all 11 time zones of Russian territory in the largest war game since the collapse of the Soviet Union.

There was no specified enemy, but the Russian forces appeared to be enacting a nationwide effort to quell unrest along Russia's southern border — and to repulse an American-led attack by NATO forces, according to experts in Moscow and here.

In a grim finale, commanders launched three intercontinental ballistic missiles, the type that can carry multiple nuclear warheads. It was a clear signal of the drastic endgame the Kremlin might consider should its conventional forces not hold. One of the missiles flew more than 7,100 miles, allowing Russian officials to claim they had set a distance record.

If these images of Russian power projection appeared drawn from the dark decades of Dr. Strangelove, the response from Washington was anything but.

When asked to assess what seemed to be a Russian resurgence, Defense Secretary Robert Gates and Admiral Mike Mullen, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, have provided the same sanguine response, echoed down through the ranks of government analysts who have spent years reading obscure Russian military journals and scrutinizing classified satellite photographs.

The Russian military fell to third world standards from neglect and budget cuts in the turbulent years when Boris Yeltsin was president, they say. The new Kremlin leadership is working to create a force that can actually defend the nation's interests.

The military has embarked upon a program to buy modern weapons, improve training and health care for troops, trim a bloated officer corps and create the first professional class of sergeant-level, small-unit leaders since World War II.

Which is not to say that the United States will stop judging Russian behavior in light of what it considers a clumsy, ill-advised and unnecessary invasion of the former Soviet republic of Georgia.

Yet policymakers also say the Kremlin's efforts at military modernization should not prevent cooperation on mutual concerns, including countering terrorism and halting nuclear proliferation.

Even a high-profile speech three weeks ago by President Dmitri A. Medvedev, ordering a military modernization program and the largest increases in defense spending since the death of the old USSR, was viewed here as short on substance and designed more for a domestic political agenda.

Medvedev declared that by 2020, Russia would construct new types of warships and an unspecified air and space defense system. Military spending, he said, will leap by 26 percent next year, bringing it to 1.3 trillion rubles (about $50 billion), its highest level since the collapse of the Soviet Union — but still a small fraction of American military spending.

Medvedev pledged that Russia would shore up its nuclear deterrence and upgrade its conventional forces to a state of "permanent combat readiness."

American experts were unimpressed. "Russia is prone to make fairly grandiose announcements about its military," said a Defense Department official who discussed government analyses on condition of anonymity. "These programs have long been in the works. They are not new plans. They are not new programs."

Even so, veteran analysts of Russian military affairs acknowledge that a military renaissance would allow the Moscow leadership to increase political pressure on former Soviet republics, now independent, as well as former Warsaw Pact allies that embraced NATO after the collapse of communism.

"What the Russian leadership has discovered is proof of an old maxim: that a foreign policy without a credible military is no foreign policy," said Dale Herspring, a scholar on Russian military affairs at Kansas State University.

Eugene Rumer, of the National Defense University here, said events of recent weeks were "not a sign, really, of the Russian military being reborn, but more of a Russia being able to flex what relatively little muscle it has on the global scale, and to show that it actually matters."

One example is how Russia's navy is seeking to display global reach. A flotilla of warships, including the nuclear battle cruiser Peter the Great, is under sail for exercises next month with Venezuela.

Russia has also announced more than $1 billion in new arms deals with the Venezuelan president, Hugo Chávez.

"This Venezuela adventure is basically Russia's payback for what they consider the humiliation of American ships' operating in the Black Sea during the war in Georgia," said Mikhail Tsypkin, of the Naval Postgraduate School in Monterey, California. "This is to annoy the United States."

Some of the steps undertaken to wrench the Russian military out of mediocrity resemble changes in the American military over several decades.

Russia plans for its ground forces to move to a system designed for the deployment of brigades, rather than bulkier division or corps headquarters — nearly copying the United States Army's approach.

The Russian military also plans to offer pay and housing incentives to attract noncommissioned officers -- the valuable class of sergeants -- to make a long-term career of military service.

While not as drastic as the move by the post-Vietnam American military to switch from the draft to an all-volunteer force, the plan would shift Russia further from reliance on one-year conscripts, who are not in uniform long enough to master even basic skills.

Just last week, the Russian military leadership announced it would further reduce the number of people in uniform, to about 1 million from the current 1.1 million, far below the 4 million-strong military at the end of the cold war.

Most significant, according to American government officials, is a four-year plan to reduce to 150,000 a Russian officer corps that now numbers 400,000, a shrinking that is certain to produce significant opposition within the senior ranks.

The Russian General Staff will be trimmed, and the number of generals is planned to fall to 900 from the current 1,100. But in an acknowledgment that the general officer corps can slow the pace of change throughout the military, most of those reductions will occur through retirement.

The Kremlin knows that its military bureaucracy is riddled with corruption, Pentagon officials say.

Experts here say that audits ordered after Vladimir Putin took over from Yeltsin in 2000 found that 40 percent of the budget for some weapons programs and salaries was lost to theft and waste.

Click here to read the rest of the story over at the International Herald Tribune website.

The new James Bond movie, Quantum of Solace, is facing a great opening weekend. The previous Bond film, Casino Royale, gained significant attention of the female audience, compliments of shirtless Daniel Craig coming out of the ocean. The new 007 film is guaranteed major success with the male audience, not only because of the numerous car chases and explosions, but mainly because of the Ukrainian model and actress Olga Kurylenko. Coincidentally, November 14 is Olga’s 29th birthday! Even though the Communist Party of the Russian Federation condemned Olga and called her “a traitor,” all she’s betraying is her real identity. In the movie she is a Bolivian, not Ukrainian, and a fighter, not a model.

Olga Konstantinovna Kurylenko (Ольга Костянтинівна Куриленко) was born on November 14, 1979, in Berdyansk, Ukraine, Soviet Union. Her mother, Marina Alyabysheva, divorced her father, Konstantin Kurylenko, soon after her birth. After the divorce, her mother struggled to survive as an art teacher. Young Olga Kurylenko was brought up by her mother and her grandmother, Raisa. During her youth, Olga had a humbling experience of living in poverty; she had no choice but to wear rags and had to darn the holes on her sweater. During the years in Ukraine she studied art, languages, did 7 years of musical school studying piano and went to a ballet studio until 13.

At age 13, Olga and her mother made a trip to Moscow. There she was scouted by an agent who approached her at a subway station and offered a job as a model. Initially, Olga's mother was suspicious, but eventually Olga made a good career choice and took training as a model in Moscow. By age 16, she was ready for the next step. She moved to Paris, learned French in six months, and was signed by the Madison agency. At age 18, Olga appeared on the cover of Glamour, then she graced magazine covers of Elle, Madame Figaro, Marie Claire, and Vogue, and also became the face of Lejaby lingerie, Bebe clothing, Clarins and Helena Rubinstein cosmetic companies.

In 1999, Olga married her friend, French photographer Cedric Van Mol and divorced him 3,5 years later. One day Olga presented herself to an acting agency. Eventually, she swapped the catwalk for celluloid, and her acting career took off. In 2005 she made her film debut as Iris, a sensual beauty in L'Annulaire (2005) by director Diane Bertrand.

Olga's cinematic roles have been notably steamy, and her natural beauty and explicit nudity attracted the attention of the male audiences. She appeared opposite Elijah Wood in Paris, je t'aime (2006) and as Le Sofia in Serpent (2006), then co-starred as Russian beauty Nika Boronina opposite Timothy Olyphant in Hitman (2007). She also appears as Mina Harud in the indy surveillance-thriller Tyranny (2008) and is billed as Camille, the Bond girl in Quantum of Solace (2008), a sequel to Casino Royale (2006).

Olga Kurylenko with Timothy Olyphant in Hitman

When she arrived for her initial audition in Paris last year, Kurylenko realized the script she had been given in advance ''wasn't the right one, not the text they were using that day.'' In order to play catch-up, the actress let others audition in front of her. ''All I could do was listen and try to pick up the correct lines, but in the end I really had to improvise a lot.

''Maybe because of that, it made me relax, knowing I had nothing to lose -- figuring there was no way I'd get the part since I was so clearly unprepared.''

Olga Kurylenko in Kiev, Ukraine

Imagine her surprise when she got a callback for a second audition, and then a third one -- ultimately doing a scene with Daniel Craig in London. ''By that point I was really nervous, because you know you're close to getting it, but you still haven't got it. You suddenly get your hopes up but don't want to want it too much, in case they pick someone else.''

An added challenge for her was the fact her character ''is a Bolivian, and I knew I was competing with actresses who were Hispanic. Spanish was their first language. ''They didn't have to fake the accent. To make sure I was convincing as a Bolivian, I worked hard on my accent every day for two weeks before I had to audition with Daniel.''

Olga Kurylenko and Daniel Craig on a Bloomberg outdoor deck in Moscow

After she got the good news she had won the role of Camille, Kurylenko underwent intensive stunt training -- to prepare her for several scenes involving rough fighting.

''The funny part is I have a big fight scene with Joaquin [Cosio, who plays the corrupt and very vicious Bolivian General Medrano] -- and he's such a teddy bear in real life, a real sweetie! Even though the stunt coaches spend months teaching you how to do certain movements so you don't get hurt, at the end of the day, certain things you have to do for real.''

In a climactic struggle with Cosio, Kurylenko said her co-star really did throw her around the room, violently pulling her hair. ''It did hurt, especially because you have to do about 20 takes of each scene. It's not the first time you fall that's so bad. It's when you fall on that same bruise, over and over again. That's the hard part, but it's what makes it all look real. When you hurt for real, you can communicate that pain in your acting.''

The cold shoulder President Medvedev gave President-Elect Obama a few days ago seems to be warming all the time. The Washington Times reports:

Russian leaders are offering an olive branch to the incoming Obama administration in hopes that it will scrap a planned missile-defense system based in Poland and the Czech Republic. Russian President Dimitry Medvedev told French journalists that he had spoken by phone with President-elect Barack Obama and that they hoped to meet as soon as possible.

"I hope ... we'll be able to find a way out of these [difficult] situations, which we haven't been able to do with our current colleagues," Mr. Medvedev said in the interview, which was broadcast Thursday.

Please visit the extended post to read the entire article.

Russian leaders are offering an olive branch to the incoming Obama administration in hopes that it will scrap a planned missile-defense system based in Poland and the Czech Republic.

Russian President Dimitry Medvedev told French journalists that he had spoken by phone with President-elect Barack Obama and that they hoped to meet as soon as possible.

"I hope ... we'll be able to find a way out of these [difficult] situations, which we haven't been able to do with our current colleagues," Mr. Medvedev said in the interview, which was broadcast Thursday.

Within hours of Mr. Obama's election last week, the Russian president threatened to base short-range missiles in Kaliningrad, a Russian enclave on the Baltic Sea sandwiched between Poland and Lithuania.

An Obama transition official confirmed that the two spoke Saturday morning.

"They both expressed a desire to meet early in the new administration and the president-elect underscored the need to collaborate on the financial crisis, nuclear proliferation, including in Iran and North Korea, and in fighting terrorism," the official said.

"The issue of missile defense did not come up in the phone call," the official said, talking on the condition of anonymity because she was not authorized to speak for attribution.

Mr. Medvedev suggested in Thursday's interview that Russia would change course if the U.S. abandoned plans for a European missile defense.

Defense Secretary Robert M. Gates said he was perplexed by the Russian threat.

"Quite frankly, I'm not clear what the missiles would be for in Kaliningrad. After all, the only real emerging threat on Russia's periphery is in Iran and I don't think the Iskander [Russian] missile has the range to get there from Kaliningrad," Mr. Gates said Thursday in the Estonian capital, Tallinn.

"Why they would threaten to point missiles at European nations seems quite puzzling to me," added Mr. Gates, who was in Europe to attend a NATO meeting.

The Russian threat was the latest move in a protracted dispute over U.S. plans to base 10 interceptors in Poland and a missile guidance radar in the Czech Republic. The U.S. insists missile defenses are needed to protect Europe from Iran.

Undersecretary of State William Burns and Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov, in Moscow earlier this week, agreed to hold the next round of security and missile-defense talks in December, State Department spokesman Robert Wood said.

The two also discussed "the global economic crisis and the need for coordinated action during this weekend´s summit meeting of G-20 leaders in Washington," Mr. Wood said.

Russia has been hard hit by the crisis and the accompanying plunge in oil prices. Its stock market fell more than 12 percent on Thursday.

Toby Gati, a Russia analyst and former assistant secretary of state for intelligence and research, said the Russians perceive a chance to improve relations.

"Whenever there's a new president, there's always a new opportunity," she said.

"The Russians were surprised by the impact of the financial crisis. They thought their hard currency reserves of half a trillion dollars were a Maginot line," she said. "They didn't realize that they can't be aggressive in foreign policy and make nice in economic affairs. Interdependence creates interdependence."

Mr. Medvedev is to attend the weekend financial summit in Washington.

Russia has called for a major overhaul of the global financial system that would give emerging economies a bigger voice in the World Bank, International Monetary Fund and other global financial institutions.

Ms. Gati said the Obama administration should make a decision on missile defense based on U.S. interests, not on how the Russians will react.

Mr. Obama said during the campaign that he supports missile defense when the technology proves reliable.

Medvedev’s statement regarding the deployment of Iskander missiles in the Kaliningrad Region in response to the US intention to station Ballistic Missile Defense (BMD) facilities in Poland and the Czech Republic was hardly among the Kremlin’s most fortunate moves. Considering that Obama himself was not a great supporter of that project--with its dubious technological efficiency and exorbitant cost--it would probably have been more expedient to let the new US president freeze or even bury this idea of the Bush Administration.

The timing for making such a statement, with Obama only just emerging victorious from a grueling race, also was rather less than perfect. After Obama’s election was secured, a phone call to congratulate the new White House resident and wish him success in his difficult mission might have been more fitting. Memorably, Putin’s phone call to Bush on 11 September 2001 was instrumental in establishing a personal friendship between the two presidents that exerted some restraint on the zeal of the Cold War Warriors.

Edward Lozansky is President of the American University in Moscow. His views are his own and do not necessarily reflect those of the Real Russia Project or Discovery Institute.

According to a recent Wall Street Journal article, Russian stocks on average are trading at slightly more than four times earnings on the MICEX and RTS stock exchanges. This level is down from thirteen times earnings at the market's peak. Overall, compared to fellow BRIC economies, Russia's stock market is down 72 percent off its 2007 peak, compared to 59 percent for Brazil, and 62 percent for India and China, according to statistics compiled by The Asia Times.

Lower commodities prices and the global credit crisis are hitting the Russian economy hard in the last half of 2008. However, unlike in 1998, when Russia's banking system and the savings of middle class Russians were wiped out, Russia has a huge stockpile of hard currency reserves to leverage as collateral in maintaining financial stability. The ruble has lost ground versus the dollar since hitting its peak in the early summer of 2008. However, the ruble has not collapsed into hyperinflation, as it did 10 years ago, and the Russian government is allowing it to depreciate against other world currencies. There are some signs that Russia can ride out the crisis -- if Western credit markets remain open to lending to Russian firms, and the West remains attractive to Russian and other sovereign wealth fund investments.

Click on the extended post to read more.

The Fallout from the Global Credit Crisis in Russia

Whether Moscow and Washington like it or not, Russia is now thoroughly integrated into the global economic system. Regardless of where the financial crisis began (and most analysts agree that it originated with a worldwide glut of money issued by central banks, including the U.S. Federal Reserve), Russia's problems cannot be separated from those of the West. The Russian government has attempted to address the crisis by cutting interest rates, and injecting cash from Russia's $500 billion in hard currency reserves into loans for major companies, including one of the largest banks in the country, Vneshtorbank (VTB). Russia's major electric utilities and automakers, just like American carmakers in Detroit, are also publically declaring that they may need government assistance. Time magazine is reporting that assembly line workers are being laid off or having their wages slashed in Nizhny Novgorod and other regional economic hubs. Russian Finance Minister Alexei Kudrin has warned that not all Russian banks and corporations should count on loans from the state and that they ought to prepare for slower growth in 2009.

Ukraine and the Energy Price Crunch

Russia still seems to have more natural resources and currency reserves to withstand the economic shocks than some of the smaller, richer European economies, like Iceland and Hungary (both members of NATO, and the latter a member of the European Union), and nations in the former Soviet Union, such as Ukraine. The collapse in prices for steel and coal, Ukraine's two most lucrative exports, have made an already shaky political situation in Kyev even more acrimonious.

If Gazprom finds itself short on Western capital for drilling and modernization, the state-owned monopoly will always find it more politically acceptable to boost the artificially low gas prices it charges Ukraine and Belarus than to squeeze domestic utilities and consumers in Russia. Western governments may dislike these actions and once again accuse the Kremlin of bullying Kyev, but they should follow the money. The harsh reality is that natural gas (and the steel made with it, whether in Russia or Ukraine) must at some point reflect the true costs of getting the raw material out of the ground in Siberia and Central Asia and shipping it to points east and west.

The former Soviet republics, as well as the Russians themselves, cannot continue to pay half or less of what Western Europeans pay for the same natural gas indefinitely. Free market economists ought to be applauding such a reckoning rather than dismissing it as "Russia using energy as a weapon". While Russia will continue to subsidize natural gas prices for its own people for some time, unlike other major energy producers such as Saudi Arabia, it does not subsidize dirt cheap gasoline at the pump. In fact, even as gasoline prices have fallen in the U.S. since reaching their peak in July 2008, Russians continue to pay more at the pump than Americans.

Can the West Keep its Own Commitment to the Ideals it Demands of Russia?

For long-term investors who remain cash-rich and liquid, the global financial crisis may present an unprecedented buying opportunity. Many smaller Russian and Ukrainian companies may end up selling for a fraction of their pre-crisis value.

Russia has not yet undergone the wholesale nationalization of its banking or financial sector, as has already occurred in many Western economies. But the question remains: can Russia and Ukraine maintain their commitment to free trade and market economics, even as these concepts are being maligned and blamed for economic failure in the West? Time will tell.

Reality is catching up fast for the Russian Federation, which begun to slowly orient its expectations towards Barack Obama's win about two weeks prior to November 4. As the Russian government and its policy analysts expected, Obama's nascent presidency will have mixed results for US-Russia relations, though cautious optimism is starting to take hold. One issue that is already grabbing headlines in Russia is the American attitude towards anti-missile shield in Europe.

As reported by the Daily Vzglyad, Obama reiterated his commitment to the Patriot missile batteries in Poland, signed earlier in August by Secretary of State Condoleeza Rice. The paper commented on Western Europe's desire for a "new beginning in relations between Russia and the US," but remained convinced that President-elect's desire not to deviate form the previous administration's plans signaled that major changes in US-Russia relations are not expected to take place anytime soon.

An even more direct opinion was voiced in the same article by Alexander Hramchikhin, director of analysis at the Center of Political and Military Studies: "Obama is inexperienced in foreign policy, and will have to heavily rely on his advisors, like Senator Biden, who is more of a hawk than McCain. ... Obama himself is a "black box" - we are not talking about the color of his skin, but about the lack of knowledge on what he will be like as President, since he has absolutely no relevant experience."

Still, there was some cautious optimism voiced by the Russian political establishment. In the same article, Konsantin Kosachev, Chairman of the Foreign Relations Committee in the Duma (and counterpart to Congressman Berman of the House Foreign Relations Committee) stated that "Obama's victory gives hope for a new reality in US-Russia relations, but it's premature to predict when that would actually take place. Obama will be under pressure from his team of advisors, whose approaches to Russia do not differ significantly from that of the Bush Administration." On the other hand, Mr. Kosachev highlighted Obama's biggest advantage in foreign policy: "Obama's thinking is not influenced too much by the Cold War. Senator Obama did not engage in openly hostile rhetoric towards Russia, which gives hope for the strengthening of our cooperation on key issues." More cautious optimism was also voiced by Sergey Markov, Duma Deputy, who stated that he "could actually imagine a personal friendship between Presidents Obama and Medvedev, since they belong to the same generation. ... They are both Internet users, and probably listened to similar music and watched similar films."

Daily Izvestia reminded its readers that Barack Obama was more popular in Russia than John McCain, citing the polling numbers by the official Levada Center. The polls were conducted in late October in eight largest cities across the Russian Federation, and 27% of Russians were favorable towards Senator Obama, while 15% were favorable towards Senator McCain. More than half of the Russian respondents could not say with which American political party can Russian government better deal with; 39% stated they prefer the Democratic party, while only 11% named Republicans.

Daily Nezavisimaya Gazeta attempted to predict that Obama's policy towards Russia will be constructive and will revolve around issues such as nuclear non-proliferation. Assistant Director of Russian Academy of Sciences Viktor Kremenyuk stated that the "starting point in US-Russia relations is now very low, and its up to the leadership of America and Russia to raise our relations to a new level. With Obama as President, both sides can continue working on issues laid out by President G. W. Bush."

Kremenyuk stated that Obama will pay attention to Russia' internal processes, but will not seek to interfere in them. On the other hand, Sergey Karaganov, Chairman of Foreign and Defense Policy at the Duma Senate stated that real changes in US-Russia relations could take place no earlier than in half a year from now. He also stated that "there will be positive changes, but Russia too will have to work hard to escape this "confrontational spiral."

This article was originally published at RealClearPolitics

Yevgeny Bendersky specializes in research and analysis of Eurasian affairs. His previous work includes position as the Senior Strategic Advisor at Jenkins Hill International, LLC. Prior to working at Jenkins Hill, Mr. Bendersky was the Foreign Affairs Legislative Assistant for Congressman Curt Weldon (Member of Congress 1987-2007). His views are his own and do not necessarily reflect those of the Real Russia Project or Discovery Institute.

What really happened to provoke the recent crisis in the Caucusus--a crisis that gravely set back Western relations with Russia--is bound to get more scholarly scrutiny with the passage of time. This latest report, in any event, is not going to help the Georgian picture.

Regardless, isn't it amazing how things have changed since August? The price of oil collapsed, and with it the urgency over pipeline routes and prices in Central Europe. Because of the financial panic, Russia's sense of invulnerability has been set back. Public perceptions of the Kremlin leadership may be deteriorating along with the market--though Russia is not yet in a recession like America is experiencing. And the U.S. has a new president-elect. President Medvedev's challenge to that new president-elect has not gone down as well in Russia as might have been expected. In short, hardly anyone is really thinking about Georgia now. What a shift!

International Herald Tribune reports:

Newly available accounts by independent military observers of the beginning of the war between Georgia and Russia this summer call into question the longstanding Georgian assertion that it was acting defensively against separatist and Russian aggression. Instead, the accounts suggest that Georgia's inexperienced military attacked the isolated separatist capital of Tskhinvali on Aug. 7 with indiscriminate artillery and rocket fire, exposing civilians, Russian peacekeepers and unarmed monitors to harm.

Visit the extended post to read the IHT article.

TBILISI, Georgia: Newly available accounts by independent military observers of the beginning of the war between Georgia and Russia this summer call into question the longstanding Georgian assertion that it was acting defensively against separatist and Russian aggression.

Instead, the accounts suggest that Georgia's inexperienced military attacked the isolated separatist capital of Tskhinvali on Aug. 7 with indiscriminate artillery and rocket fire, exposing civilians, Russian peacekeepers and unarmed monitors to harm.

The accounts are neither fully conclusive nor broad enough to settle the many lingering disputes over blame in a war that hardened relations between the Kremlin and the West. But they raise questions about the accuracy and honesty of Georgia's insistence that its shelling of Tskhinvali, the capital of the breakaway region of South Ossetia, was a precise operation. Georgia has variously defended the shelling as necessary to stop heavy Ossetian shelling of Georgian villages, bring order to the region or counter a Russian invasion.

President Mikheil Saakashvili of Georgia has characterized the attack as a precise and defensive act. But according to observations of the monitors, documented Aug. 7 and Aug. 8, Georgian artillery rounds and rockets were falling throughout the city at intervals of 15 to 20 seconds between explosions, and within the first hour of the bombardment at least 48 rounds landed in a civilian area. The monitors have also said they were unable to verify that ethnic Georgian villages were under heavy bombardment that evening, calling to question one of Saakashvili's main justifications for the attack.

Senior Georgian officials contest these accounts, and have urged Western governments to discount them. "That information, I don't know what it is and how it is confirmed," said Giga Bokeria, Georgia's deputy foreign minister. "There is such an amount of evidence of continuous attacks on Georgian-controlled villages and so much evidence of Russian military buildup, it doesn't change in any case the general picture of events."

He added: "Who was counting those explosions? It sounds a bit peculiar."

The Kremlin has embraced the monitors' observations, which, according to a written statement from Grigory Karasin, Russia's deputy foreign minister, reflect "the actual course of events prior to Georgia's aggression." He added that the accounts "refute" allegations by Tbilisi of bombardments that he called mythical.

The monitors were members of an international team working under the mandate of the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe, or OSCE. A multilateral organization with 56 member states, the group has monitored the conflict since a previous cease-fire agreement in the 1990s.

The observations by the monitors, including a Finnish major, a Belorussian airborne captain and a Polish civilian, have been the subject of two confidential briefings to diplomats in Tbilisi, the Georgian capital, one in August and the other in October. Summaries were shared with The New York Times by people in attendance at both.

Details were then confirmed by three Western diplomats and a Russian, and were not disputed by the OSCE's mission in Tbilisi, which was provided with a written summary of the observations.

Saakashvili, who has compared Russia's incursion into Georgia to the Nazi annexations in Europe in 1938 and the Soviet suppression of Prague in 1968, faces domestic unease with his leadership and skepticism about his judgment from Western governments.

The brief war was a disaster for Georgia. The attack backfired. Georgia's army was humiliated as Russian forces overwhelmed its brigades, seized and looted their bases, captured their equipment and roamed the country's roads at will. Villages that Georgia vowed to save were ransacked and cleared of their populations by irregular Ossetian, Chechen and Cossack forces, and several were burned to the ground.

Massing of Weapons

According to the monitors, an OSCE patrol at 3 p.m. on Aug. 7 saw large numbers of Georgian artillery and grad rocket launchers massing on roads north of Gori, just south of the enclave.

At 6:10 p.m., the monitors were told by Russian peacekeepers of suspected Georgian artillery fire on Khetagurovo, an Ossetian village; this report was not independently confirmed, and Georgia declared a unilateral cease-fire shortly thereafter, about 7 p.m.

During a news broadcast that began at 11 p.m., Georgia announced that Georgian villages were being shelled, and declared an operation "to restore constitutional order" in South Ossetia. The bombardment of Tskhinvali started soon after the broadcast.

According to the monitors, however, no shelling of Georgian villages could be heard in the hours before the Georgian bombardment. At least two of the four villages that Georgia has since said were under fire were near the observers' office in Tskhinvali, and the monitors there likely would have heard artillery fire nearby.

Moreover, the observers made a record of the rounds exploding after Georgia's bombardment began at 11:35 p.m. At 11:45 p.m., rounds were exploding at intervals of 15 to 20 seconds between impacts, they noted.

At 12:15 a.m. on Aug. 8, General Major Marat Kulakhmetov, commander of Russian peacekeepers in the enclave, reported to the monitors that his unit had casualties, indicating that Russian soldiers had come under fire.

By 12:35 a.m. the observers had recorded at least 100 heavy rounds exploding across Tskhinvali, including 48 close to the observers' office, which is in a civilian area and was damaged.

Colonel General Anatoly Nogovitsyn, a spokesman for the Russian Defense Ministry, said that by morning on Aug. 8 two Russian soldiers had been killed and five wounded. Two senior Western military officers stationed in Georgia, speaking on condition of anonymity because they work with Georgia's military, said that whatever Russia's behavior in or intentions for the enclave, once Georgia's artillery or rockets struck Russian positions, conflict with Russia was all but inevitable. This clear risk, they said, made Georgia's attack dangerous and unwise.

Senior Georgia officials, a group with scant military experience and personal loyalties to Saakashvili, have said that much of the damage to Tskhinvali was caused in combat between its soldiers and separatists, or by Russian airstrikes and bombardments in its counterattack the next day. As for its broader shelling of the city, Georgia has told Western diplomats that Ossetians hid weapons in civilian buildings, making them legitimate targets.

"The Georgians have been quite clear that they were shelling targets — the mayor's office, police headquarters — that had been used for military purposes," said Matthew Bryza, a deputy assistant secretary of state and one of Saakashvili's vocal supporters in Washington.

Those claims have not been independently verified, and Georgia's account was disputed by Ryan Grist, a former British Army captain who was the senior OSCE representative in Georgia when the war broke out. Grist said that he was in constant contact that night with all sides, with the office in Tskhinvali and with Wing Commander Stephen Young, the retired British military officer who leads the monitoring team.

"It was clear to me that the attack was completely indiscriminate and disproportionate to any, if indeed there had been any, provocation," Grist said. "The attack was clearly, in my mind, an indiscriminate attack on the town, as a town."

Grist has served as a military officer or diplomat in Northern Ireland, Cyprus, Kosovo and Yugoslavia. In August, after the Georgian foreign minister, Eka Tkeshelashvili, who has no military experience, assured diplomats in Tbilisi that the attack was measured and discriminate, Grist gave a briefing to diplomats from the European Union that drew from the monitors' observations and included his assessments. He then soon resigned under unclear circumstances.

A second briefing was led by Young in October for military attachés visiting Georgia. At the meeting, according to a person in attendance, Young stood by the monitors' assessment that Georgian villages had not been extensively shelled on the evening or night of Aug. 7. "If there had been heavy shelling in areas that Georgia claimed were shelled, then our people would have heard it, and they didn't," Young said, according to the person who attended. "They heard only occasional small-arms fire."

The O.S.C.E turned down a request by The Times to interview Young and the monitors, saying they worked in sensitive jobs and would not be publicly engaged in this disagreement.

Grievances and Exaggeration

Disentangling the Russian and Georgian accounts has been complicated. The violence along the enclave's boundaries that had occurred in recent summers was more widespread this year, and in the days before Aug. 7 there had been shelling of Georgian villages. Tensions had been soaring.

Each side has fresh lists of grievances about the other, which they insist are decisive. But both sides also have a record of misstatement and exaggeration, which includes circulating casualty estimates that have not withstood independent examination. With the international standing of both Russia and Georgia damaged, the public relations battle has been intensive.

Russian military units have been implicated in destruction of civilian property and accused by Georgia of participating with Ossetian militias in a campaign of ethnic cleansing. Russia and South Ossetia have accused Georgia of attacking Ossetian civilians.

But a critical and as yet unanswered question has been what changed for Georgia between 7 p.m. on Aug 7, when Saakashvili declared a cease-fire, and 11:30 p.m., when he says he ordered the attack. The Russian and Ossetian governments have said the cease-fire was a ruse used to position rockets and artillery for the assault.

That view is widely held by Ossetians. Civilians repeatedly reported resting at home after the cease-fire broadcast by Saakashvili. Emeliya B. Dzhoyeva, 68, was home with her husband, Felix, 70, when the bombardment began. He lost his left arm below the elbow and suffered burns to his right arm and torso. "Saakashvili told us that nothing would happen," she said. "So we all just went to bed."

Neither Georgia nor its Western allies have as yet provided conclusive evidence that Russia was invading the country or that the situation for Georgians in the Ossetian zone was so dire that a large-scale military attack was necessary, as Saakashvili insists.

Georgia has released telephone intercepts indicating that a Russian armored column apparently entered the enclave from Russia early on the Aug. 7, which would be a violation of the peacekeeping rules. Georgia said the column marked the beginning of an invasion. But the intercepts did not show the column's size, composition or mission, and there has not been evidence that it was engaged with Georgian forces until many hours after the Georgian bombardment; Russia insists it was simply a routine logistics train or troop rotation.

Unclear Accounts of Shelling

Interviews by The Times have found a mixed picture on the question of whether Georgian villages were shelled after Saakashvili declared the cease-fire. Residents of the village of Zemo Nigozi, one of the villages that Georgia has said was under heavy fire, said they were shelled from 6 p.m. on, supporting Georgian statements.

In two other villages, interviews did not support Georgian claims. In Avnevi, several residents said the shelling stopped before the cease-fire and did not resume until roughly the same time as the Georgian bombardment. In Tamarasheni, some residents said they were lightly shelled on the evening of Aug. 7, but felt safe enough not to retreat to their basements. Others said they were not shelled until Aug 9.

With a paucity of reliable and unbiased information available, the OSCE observations put the United States in a potentially difficult position. The United States, Saakashvili's principal source of international support, has for years accepted the organization's conclusions and praised its professionalism. Bryza refrained from passing judgment on the conflicting accounts.

"I wasn't there," he said, referring to the battle. "We didn't have people there. But the OSCE really has been our benchmark on many things over the years."

The OSCE itself, while refusing to discuss its internal findings, stood by the accuracy of its work but urged caution in interpreting it too broadly. "We are confident that all OSCE observations are expert, accurate and unbiased," Martha Freeman, a spokeswoman, said in an e-mail message. "However, monitoring activities in certain areas at certain times cannot be taken in isolation to provide a comprehensive account."

The Russian Navy has witnessed three high profile fatal accidents at sea in the last ten years: the 2000 sinking of the Kursk in the Barents Sea; the 2003 sinking of a retiring sub that went down with 11 sailors on board; and now another mishap on board an attack submarine in the Pacific Fleet this weekend, which suffocated 20 Russian sailors and left 21 others hospitalized.

The incident happened Saturday as the Nerpa, a (NATO designated) Akula II class nuclear-powered attack submarine, was undergoing its first major sea trials after leaving its base near the Russian Far East port of Vladivostok. A freon fire control system unexpectedly activated, suffocating crew members who were caught in the affected compartments. Apparently the crew members did not have access to or were not trained to use their emergency respirator devices to breathe.

Construction on the Akula boat reportedly began in 1991 and funds only became available to complete the submarine in the last few years. Russia's Navy remains a shadow of its Soviet predecessor, with poor crewmember pay and thin to non-existent budgets for training in the past fifteen years taking their toll on a service that the Putin/Medvedev Administration seeks to reconstitute. In October 2008 President Medvedev proposed that Russia build new aircraft carrier battle groups, complete with aircraft, support ships and submarines. But this vision seems to be little more than a fantasy, in light of the global economic crisis and falling oil export revenues undercutting the Russian federal budget.

Click on the extended post to read an excerpt from the Associated Press story about this tragedy.

Accident on Russian nuclear sub suffocates 20
By VLADIMIR ISACHENKOV
Associated Press Writer Vladimir Isachenkov, Associated Press Writer

MOSCOW – The fire safety system on a brand-new Russian nuclear submarine accidentally turned on as the sub was being tested in the Sea of Japan, spewing chemicals that suffocated 20 people and sent 21 others to the hospital, officials said Sunday.

The Russian Navy said the submarine itself was not damaged in Saturday's accident and returned to its base on Russia's Pacific coast under its own power Sunday. The accident also did not pose any radiation danger, the navy said.

Yet it was Russia's worst naval accident since torpedo explosions sank another nuclear-powered submarine, the Kursk, in the Barents Sea in 2000, killing all 118 seamen aboard.

The victims suffocated Saturday after the submarine's fire-extinguishing system released Freon gas, said Sergei Markin, an official with Russia's top investigative agency. He said forensic tests found Freon in the victims' lungs.

Seventeen civilians and three seamen died in the accident and 21 others were hospitalized after being evacuated to shore, Russian navy spokesman Capt. Igor Dygalo said. None of the injuries were life-threatening, he added.

"The submarine's nuclear reactor was operating normally and radiation levels were normal," he said, adding the accident affected two sections of the submarine closest to the bow.

Markin's agency, the Investigative Committee under the Prosecutor General's office, has launched a probe into the accident, which he said will focus on what activated the firefighting system and possible violations of operating rules.

Lev Fyodorov, a top Russian chemical expert, said the freon pushed oxygen out, causing those inside to die of suffocation. But he said the limited information released by the government was making it difficult to understand exactly what happened. He wondered specifically about the individual breathing kits that everyone on board is supposed to have.

"People on board the sub may have failed to use their breathing equipment when they found themselves in an emergency," he told the AP.

Igor Kurdin, a retired navy officer who heads an association of former submariners, told Ekho Moskvy radio that the high death toll probably resulted from shipyard workers who lacked experience in dealing with breathing kits.

A siren warning the crew that the firefighting system was turning on also may have failed, the RIA Novosti news agency quoted an unidentified navy official as saying, so those on board might not have realized that Freon was being released until it was too late.

The submarine returned to Bolshoi Kamen, a military shipyard and a navy base near Vladivostok. Officials at the Amur Shipbuilding Factory told Russian news agencies the submarine was built there and is called the Nerpa.

Overcrowding may have been a factor. Dygalo said the submarine had 208 people aboard, including 81 servicemen, and was to be commissioned by the navy later this year. Yet Amur factory officials told news agencies that a submarine of this type normally carries only a crew of 73.

Construction of the Nerpa, an Akula II class attack submarine, started in 1991 but was suspended for years because of a shortage of funding, they said. Testing on the submarine began last month and it submerged for the first time last week.

The U.S.-based intelligence risk assessment agency Stratfor said the Akula is an established design, with the Nerpa being the 11th ship of the class.

"Such a catastrophic accident calls into question the way the Russian navy has sustained its institutional knowledge in terms of design expertise, not to mention issues of quality-control both in fabrication and inspection," Stratfor said.

Saturday's accident came as the Kremlin is seeking to restore Russia's naval reach, part of a drive to show off the nuclear-armed country's clout amid strained ties with the West. A naval squadron is heading to Venezuela for joint exercises this month in a show of force near U.S. waters.

Despite a major boost in military spending during Vladimir Putin's eight years as president, Russia's military is still hampered by decrepit infrastructure, aging weapons and problems with corruption and incompetence.

Gennady Illarionov, a retired submarine officer, told RIA Novosti that the accident appeared to reflect the loss of crucial skills in conducting sea trials, since the navy has commissioned only a small number of new ships since the 1991 Soviet collapse.

"During the Soviet times, we commissioned from three to five submarines a year, and now we get just one in five years," Illarionov was quoted by RIA Novosti as saying. "People forgot caution and lost their skills."

Click here to read more about this story from the BBC world service.

...And now for some good news amidst the general economic malaise gripping Russia and the Western economies. After years of dependency on imports and neglect following the collapse of the Soviet collective farming system, Russia is making great strides in agriculture.

Although it may have been forgotten, prior to the Bolshevik Revolution, Russia, Belarus, and Ukraine were the breadbaskets of Europe. With sufficient credit for farmers and other policies encouraging investment in the regions, the Russians may very well join the U.S., Australia and South America as breadbaskets for a hungry planet.

According to a post by the strategist and author Thomas P.M. Barnett on his blog:

One sector looking up long term for Russia is ag. Lots of arable land not being used, and Russia is already a big global source (one of four) for net grain exports. Plus, yields in Russia stand about 30% of that in the advanced West—hence the investment payoff opportunity...

The UN says Russia has 480,000 square miles of arable land. That's twice the size of France and 8% of the world total...

Amazingly enough, with all that potential, Russian ag land costs about 10% of that in France and 20% of that in Brazil.

Read an excerpt from the original BusinessWeek article in the extended post.

Farming Makes a Comeback in Russia
Investors are pouring billions into agribusiness—and trying to reverse decades of Soviet mismanagement
By Jason Bush
October 9, 2008, 5:00PM EST

USMAN, RUSSIA Under a baking sun, two green combine harvesters trundled across a vast expanse of yellow barley, unloading their grain into waiting trucks. It was a bumper harvest in Usman, a rural district some 300 miles south of Moscow. Yields of barley almost doubled this year. And there was plenty more to come. On the endless plains of southern Russia this summer, wheat, corn, and sunflowers towered high above the rich black soil for mile after mile.

Just four years ago the same fields sprouted nothing but wild grasses. Although this land had been farmed for centuries, the tradition nearly died out in the 1990s. The Soviet kolkhozy, or collective farms—hardly paragons of agricultural efficiency—went bankrupt as communism collapsed, and villagers abandoned the land. "When Gorbachev came to power, everything began to fall apart," says Alexander Gulov, a former boss of a collective farm in Usman.

But farming in the area, and across Russia's traditional grain belt, is making a comeback. Commodities traders, food processors, shipping outfits, and others are buying up farms, hoping to cash in on high global grain prices. These new investors are pouring billions of dollars into land, then revamping management and technology in operations that span thousands of acres. Today, large agricultural holding companies control some 10% of Russia's farmland, up from 4% in 2003—though in the most productive areas they have more than a quarter of the land, according to the Institute for Agricultural Market Studies in Moscow. "There's huge potential here," says Robert Coleman, a South African who oversees farms in the region for Agro-Invest, a Moscow group that owns 100,000 acres around Usman. "We've invested in big machines, are applying Western ideas, and are getting great results."

It's easy to see why there's so much interest. The U.N. says Russia has some 480,000 square miles of arable land—an area more than twice the size of France. That's 8% of the world's total, much of it highly fertile "black earth." But owing to decades of agricultural mismanagement, Russia accounts for less than 4% of global crop production and is a net food importer.

Among the biggest of the new outfits is Agro-Invest. Over the past two years it has spent some $350 million and now has nearly 900,000 acres. The company farms wheat, barley, corn, and oilseed across a broad swath of southern Russia. Although it's still operating at a loss, revenue is on track to top $40 million this year, roughly double the level in 2007. "Today only big agro-industrial holdings can be profitable in farming, because it requires huge financial resources," says Zorigto Sakhanov, Agro-Invest's chairman. In December, Agro-Invest's parent company, Swedish-backed Black Earth Farming, raised $256 million with a listing in Stockholm, giving it a market capitalization of roughly $1 billion.

Other investors are joining the land grab. Alpcot Agro, a Swedish company, has invested $230 million in Russia and controls over 120,000 acres. Russia's RAV Agro-Pro, with Israeli, U.S., and British funding, has some 370,000 acres. Danish-backed Trigon Agri has acquired 300,000 acres in Russia and Ukraine since it was established two years ago. All three companies plan public share offerings when global market conditions improve.

Out in Usman, the foreign investors' confidence is shared by locals. "Russia's possibilities are simply colossal," says Viktor Karnushin, Agro-Invest's regional boss. He says the company will boost the acreage under cultivation by 50% in the coming year, and productivity will improve rapidly as the farms use more imported machinery. Wheat yields, he says, should climb by 25%. "People were worried [in the 1990s] about the future, but now they understand that everything will be O.K.," says the former army colonel.

He can't wait to show off the farm's latest acquisition: a $300,000 Canadian Bourgault cultivator. In recent years the farm has replaced most of its rusty old Russian tractors and harvesters with equipment from Illinois-based John Deere. "There's simply no comparison," says tractor driver Nikolai Yaroslavtsev, who complains that his old Russian model was forever breaking down. These days a GPS navigation device helps the tractor stay on course as it traverses the fields. All the new technology means the company employs 340 people on land that was farmed by 3,000 during the collective farm days—and Agro-Invest grows more crops.

Throughout Russia, there's huge potential for similar productivity gains. Grain yields in the country average around 1 ton per acre, only about a quarter of what farmers in Western Europe get, says investment bank Troika Dialog. But Russian land averages $400 per acre—a mere 10% of the cost in France, and 20% of the price of land in Brazil.

In the countryside, Russia's capitalist revolution is still a work in progress. A communist-era ban on the sale of agricultural land wasn't scrapped until 2003. Even now, local authorities suspicious of outside investors often find ways to block land sales. About three-quarters of farmland is still controlled by the former collectives, and 10% belongs to small farmers. And there's always the risk—as with Russia's oil and gas industries—of a backlash against foreign ownership. Foreigners are barred from buying farmland, although companies such as Black Earth Farming have circumvented the restrictions by creating a Russian subsidiary, while Alpcot Agro and others hold long-term leases on their land. "Business is very local in Russia, and you need to have support from the local authorities," says Bjorn Lindstrom, investment manager for Alpcot.

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