January 22:
In a sign of the increasingly dangerous media environment within Russia, the liberal Novaya Gazeta has applied to the Federal Security Bureau (FSB) for gun licenses for its staff and reporters. According to RIA Novosti, the paper’s move comes following the fatal shooting of one of its journalists in broad daylight in downtown Moscow. “We will address an unusual request to the Federal Security Service: If you are unable to ensure our security, let our journalists have firearms," billionaire Alexander Lebedev, a co-owner of the paper, has commented.
Russia will allow its national currency, the ruble, to devalue by about ten percent in coming days as part of efforts to shore up the country’s ailing economy and alleviate economic pressure on the Russian government, the country’s central bank has said. “From January 23, the upper limit of the technical corridor will be established at a level of 41 rubles, which with the current exchange rate of 1.3 dollars to one euro corresponds to 36 rubles to one US dollar," the Agence France Presse reports the bank as saying. According to the news agency, the move marks the first time since the onset of the global financial crisis that Russia has widened the corridor within which the ruble moves against the dollar and the Euro.
January 23:
Russia is expanding its grip on energy in Latin America. RIA Novosti reports that a Russian energy consortium now operating in Venezuela will soon begin operations in Cuba as well. As part of a new deal overseen by Russian Deputy Prime Minister Igor Sechin and Cuban Council of Ministers Vice President Ricardo Cabrisas, the group of Russian oil and natural gas companies (Gazprom, Rosneft, TNK-BP, Surgutneftegaz and LUKoil) currently working in Venezuela will begin cooperation on projects with Cuba’s state-controlled oil firm, Cubapetroleo.
The agreement comes following an assessment late last year that Cuba – which currently produces just 60,000 barrels of oil a day, may have more than 20 billion barrels of crude in its territorial waters. According to plans drawn up by the Russian consortium, the oil thereby produced is intended for export to China, the U.S. and Europe.
January 24:
The global economic crisis is wreaking havoc on Russia’s jobs market. Reuters reports that, in the past two months alone, some 1 million Russians have lost their jobs as part of the global economic downturn. The news agency cites Yuri Gertsiy, the head of Russia’s federal employment service, as saying that official statistics indicate the “number of people who do not have a job or are searching is approximately 6 million people” – an increase of one million over November 2008 levels.
January 26:
The Russian Orthodox Church’s upcoming election will be a three-way race between “three alleged former KGB agents,” the Times of London reports. The election, intended to pick a successor to longtime Patriarch Aleksii II, who died in December, pits the widespread favorite, Metropolitan Kirill of Smolensk and Kaliningrad, (who now serves as the Church’s interim Patriarch) against two leading rivals, Metropolitan Kliment of Kaluga and Borovsk and Metropolitan Filaret of Minsk and Slutsk. All three have been accused of working during the Cold War as agents of the Soviet intelligence.
This state of affairs, experts say, should not be surprising. "It's quite clear that you could not be named a [church] leader without being a signed-up KGB agent,” Felix Corley of Forum 18, a religious freedom watchdog, tells the Times. Simply put, Soviet authorities “would not allow anyone to go abroad and represent religious organizations without it being controlled by the KGB."