August 26:
The Kremlin is moving to mend fences with Belarus. Pravda reports that Russian President Dmitry Medvedev is slated to meet with his Belarusian counterpart, Aleksandr Lukashenko, in coming days to paper over a series of recent disagreements between Moscow and Minsk. Among the outstanding issues are a number of recent political and economic disputes, chief among them Belarus' refusal thus far to ratify the establishment of a rapid reaction force by the Collective Security Treaty Organization, a regional security bloc spearheaded by Russia.
August 27:
On orders from President Dmitry Medvedev, Russian prosecutors have launched a series of investigations into state-run corporations, RIA Novosti reports. The inspections, the news agency reports, have targeted compliance with federal regulations and good governance in a series of companies - among them Russia's state nuclear firm, Rosatom, and Olympstroi, the official organization overseeing Russia's preparations for the 2014 Olympics in Sochi. The probes come after President Medvedev's recent decision to review "the expediency of the future use of such business structures as state-run corporations."
August 30:
Russian president Dmitry Medvedev has called for further improvements to Russia's education system. "The situation we are in now is not as difficult as it was in the 1990s, when our teachers were being paid virtually nothing... But on the other hand, we have not yet made a qualitative leap," Medvedev said in a televised interview with the Vesti channel, the comments from which were carried by RIA Novosti. "We understand that there were also a range of problems in the Soviet education system. Without even considering the ideological slant, which was always present, colleges were far from equal." To remedy the situation, Medvedev has called for the creation of a "modern education system, worthy of Russia in the 21st Century."
September 2:
In a bizarre twist, an investigation by the Israeli newspaper Yediot Ahronot has revealed that the July hijacking of the "Arctic Sea," a Russian commercial vessel, was ordered by the Kremlin. The "Arctic Sea" went missing while sailing to Algeria, laden with what was believed to be arms intended for recipients in the Middle East. Conventional wisdom had it that the vessel had been intercepted by Israel, but Yediot reports - based on interviews with Russian, European and Middle Eastern sources - that circumstantial evidence points to an operation carried out by the Russian government forces in an effort to curb a weapons transfer from private sources that could have potentially destabilizing effects on the region.
September 3:
Russia is negotiating the sale of advance fighter aircraft to Syria, a senior Russian defense industry official has confirmed. The Agence France Presse, citing the Russian daily Kommersant, reports that Alexei Fedotov, the head of the state-controlled United Aircraft Corporation, has disclosed details of the deal. "A few years ago, two contracts were signed: one for (the supply to Syria of) MiG-29s and one for MiG-31s," Fedotov recently told Kommersant. The previously-unknown $500 million deal, signed back in 2007, would supply the regime of Bashar al-Assad in Damascus with eight advanced MiG-31 fighters.
While the sale has potentially significant ramification for the regional balance of power in the Levant, for Russia the objective of the sale is local - to help stabilize the country's ailing defense industry. "Negotiations are ongoing, I hope that in the end the contracts will be realized. We put a lot of hope in it stabilizing the situation in Nizhny Novgorod [Russia's defense production capital]," Fedotov has said.
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