Free Republic

The Moscow City Court is due to hear the verdict Thursday in the politically charged trial of former Yukos security chief Alexei Pichugin, who stands accused of a series of contract killings, including the 1998 murder of Nefteyugansk mayor Vladimir Petukhov. The case is a key part of the state's efforts to link former Yukos CEO Mikhail Khodorkovsky's chief lieutenant, Leonid Nevzlin, to the killings. State prosecutor Kamil Kashayev has asked the court to hand down a life sentence for Pichugin, who is already serving 20 years in jail after being convicted last year of organizing the double murder of...

KIROVSK, Murmanskaya Oblast - The 30,000 inhabitants of this Arctic town in the middle of the vast Kola Peninsula pride themselves on being happy and hospitable. There are reasons for this: For an industrial town, the multicolored buildings look refreshingly pristine and the view is panoramic, especially this time of year, when the sun always hangs in the sky, except for an occasional dip behind the barren and breathtaking Khibiny mountains. But life hasn't always been so idyllic. Like hundreds of other outcroppings in Stalin's gulag system, Kirovsk was designed as a labor camp of death and detainment. It is...

A large chunk of the cash state-owned Rosneft paid for its acquisition of Yukos' main production unit, Yuganskneftegaz, may have been initially transferred from the Federal Treasury, Vedomosti reported Friday, citing a series of transactions shown on a database that purports to be from the Central Bank. If the contents of the database are true, the data may indicate what many market watchers have believed for some time: that Rosneft did not immediately pay for Yugansk, but instead first borrowed money from the government in what looks like an insider deal. If true, the disclosures appear to show that even...

When the compact figure of Vladimir Putin strode onto the world stage after his success in the 2000 presidential elections, a tremor of anxiety passed through the collective body of Western leaders. Gone was the boozy, bumbling, free-wheeling Boris Yeltsin, clown-prince of post-Soviet Russia who had unaccountably found himself in the box seat at the historic moment when his country was rolling up the Communist empire. The new leader of the new Russia was his polar opposite. A former KGB colonel, Putin was the identikit Soviet-style apparatchik: hard-eyed, unsmiling, tightly disciplined. And he had a black-belt in judo to prove...

Will Baron Rothschild give shares to President Putin? It seems that the main problem is solved: oil oligarch, head of Yukos Mikhail Khodorkovsky is waiting for his attorney in a cosy chamber meant for four prisoners of the detention center #4. But according to the Russian tradition, as soon as people do something they start thinking why it has been done. As it turns out, this aspect of the problem has not been considered yet. The Russian mass media report that for fear to lose the control over Yukos, Russia's largest and one of the world largest oil companies, the...

Criminal investigations into the oil-and-banking empire of Russia's wealthiest tycoon have shocked the capital, sent the stock market into a nosedive and even stirred up worries about the fragility of the country's fledgling democracy. Heavy-handed raids in recent weeks by the tax police and security agencies have targeted Yukos, the conglomerate headed by Mikhail Khodorkovsky, a 40-year-old magnate whose personal fortune is estimated at $8 billion US. Some observers suggest the Yukos investigations could be the start of a serious Kremlin campaign against Russia's so-called oligarchs, the handful of young businessmen who schemed to take control of key industries and...