Russia Reform Monitor: No. 1566

June 5:

Russia has closed down the final reactor of a Siberian plutonium production plant as part of a nuclear non-proliferation agreement with the United States. “The ADE-5 reactor was finally stopped today and from this moment the Siberian Chemical Combine has ceased turning out weapons grade material,” a spokeswoman for the plant in the closed city of Seversk, formerly known as Tomsk-7, told Reuters. “From now on the combine will move to exclusively peaceful activities.”

A trial jury in Moscow’s Regional Court has acquitted retired military intelligence colonel Vladimir Kvachkov and former paratroopers Robert Yashin and Alexander Naidyonov of trying to murder Anatoly Chubais, the architect of Russia’s 1990s privatization program who now heads the state-controlled electricity monopoly. As the Associated Press notes, Chubais was not hurt when assailants detonated a bomb in front of his armored vehicle and then shot at it in an ambush outside Moscow in March 2005. Kvachkov praised jurors for their “courage” while Chubais called the acquittal a mistake. “I’m sure that Kvachkov and those who support him hate me and want to see me dead,” RIA Novosti quoted Chubais as saying.


June 6:

BP chief executive Tony Hayward has met in Moscow with rival shareholders in the TNK-BP join venture as the parties sought to patch up their differences, the Daily Telegraph reports. Hayward said a meeting with Mikhail Fridman had been “positive” while Viktor Vekselberg, another major TNK-BP shareholder, predicted the dispute over the venture’s strategy to end soon. While the Russian owners have demanded TNK-BP chief executive Robert Dudley’s resignation, Dudley, backed by BP, has refused to step down. On June 5th, an Interior Ministry department issued a summons to Dudley as part of a 2001-2003 tax investigation.

Vasily Piskaryov, a senior official at the Investigative Committee of the Prosecutor General’s Office, has said that the illegal earnings of corrupt officials equal about a third of Russia’s federal budget, Rosbalt reports. According to Piskaryov, businessmen spend $33 billion a year to bribe officials, with lower level corruption adding another $3 billion.

President Dmitry Medvedev has used an informal summit meeting of CIS leaders in St. Petersburg to warn Ukraine and Georgia against joining NATO. According to NEWSru.com, Medvedev told Ukrainian President Viktor Yushchenko in a one-on-one meeting that joining NATO would violate the Russian-Ukrainian treaty on friendship and cooperation, which, Medvedev said, “assumes that neither country will create a threat to the security of the other.” Interfax quotes Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov as saying that Medvedev, in a separate meeting with Georgian President Mikheil Saakashvili, warned against trying to resolve the conflicts in the breakaway republics of Abkhazia and South Ossetia by joining NATO.


June 7:

In his first major speech on economics since taking office, President Medvedev has blamed the United States for the global economic downturn and offered Moscow’s help, Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty reports. “The failure to properly assess risk by the largest financial corporations, combined with the aggressive financial policies of the world’s largest economy, have led not only to losses for those corporations, but unfortunately have impoverished the majority of people on the planet,” he said in the keynote speech at the St. Petersburg Economic Forum.


June 10:

Police in Moscow have questioned TNK-BP chief executive Robert Dudley for more than five hours, thereby, according to Reuters, “adding to pressure on the company that some analysts believe is headed for Russian state control.” Dudley, however, told reporters outside an Interior Ministry office in Moscow that the interrogation was “a very routine meeting” during which there were “no problems.”