ISSUE #23
06/27/2011
On 24 June 2011, the Kiev Pecherskyy district court started a preliminary hearing of the criminal case against Ukrainian opposition leader and former Prime Minister Yuliya Tymoshenko. She is accused of abusing power, which allegedly took place when she signed gas contracts with Russia in 2009. READ MORE

• June 29, 2011

Gorshenin Institute conducted a round table called “The relations between Ukraine and Russia after Ukraine signs the FTZ agreement with the EU”, where experts discussed the future of Ukrainian-Russian relations in the event of Ukraine signing the Free Trade Zone Agreement with Europe.

The President of expert consulting firm “NEOKON”, Mikhail Khazin, thinks that if Ukraine enters a Free Trade Zone with the EU it can lose the Russian market and a number of its industries. READ MORE

• June 29, 2011

A wide strip of mainland and continental shelf territory starting from the Rus- sian sector of the Arctic up to the Arabian Peninsula can be labelled an Arctic - Arabian hydrocarbon belt (CH-belt) of Eurasia. It is the strip where the major mainland oil and gas fields are located on the territory of Russia, Kazakhstan, Uzbekistan, Turkmenistan, Iran, and the Gulf and Arabian Peninsula countries. As the production of hydrocarbons has been developing, transport routes to the markets of their consumption, the major of which is the European Union, started to branch off this diagonal CH-belt of Eurasia in the latitudinal direction. Practically, these transport routes connect the area of production (upstream) with the consumption market (downstream).

• June 28, 2011

Russia and Ukraine are among seven nations that will join an EU nuclear stress test program to examine whether nuclear power plants can withstand accidents and disasters.

• June 27, 2011

Much to the surprise of the government in Sofia, Russia has announced it has not been informed of Bulgaria's decision to freeze Belene nuclear project for another three months as of July.

• June 24, 2011

Kazakhstan's Senate was guided by the weight of public opinion in voting down a bill to send troops to Afghanistan, Speaker Kairat Mami said in Astana today.

• June 23, 2011

Mongolia's growing dependence on neighbouring Russia and China for fuel and power poses a major risk to its booming mining sector that investors need to consider, foreign business executives said

• June 22, 2011

The Russian Federation Council, the upper chamber of the parliament, ratified a protocol on Wednesday extending Russia's use of a military base in Armenia.

• June 22, 2011