Russian

An experimental robotic space plane developed for the Air Force is slated to launch Friday from Cape Canaveral, fueling an ongoing mystery about its hush-hush payload and overall mission. Watching the pilotless spacecraft along with the Pentagon will also be wary Russian and Chinese military officials who have raised questions about U.S. intentions since the government launched its first version of the secret plane into orbit almost a year ago. The X-37B Orbital Test Vehicle looks like a miniature version of the space shuttle.

MOSCOW — Russian riot police cleared a Moscow park early Wednesday of a weeklong encampment considered a local version of the Occupy movement, and hours later clashed with antigovernment protesters outside a Stalinist skyscraper in a different part of downtown. The dispersal of several dozen protesters at the park encampment, called Occupy Abai, preceded a nighttime confrontation at Kudrinskaya Square, where several hundred protesters had gathered to oppose President Vladimir Putin.

Already imprisoned for nearly eight years, the inmate who once was Russia's richest man must still see at least 1,800 more sunrises from behind his barracks window, his view of the real world beyond the camp fence with barbed wire on top. But armed with a pen and pencil, Mikhail Khodorkovsky is following in a grand, if grim, Russian literary tradition: writing about his life in a gulag-style camp he has described as "an anti-world" where "lying is...

MOSCOW - A new Russian passenger plane with 50 people aboard went missing Wednesday during a demonstration flight over Indonesia, officials said. The Sukhoi Superjet 100, on a South Asian promotional tour, disappeared from radar screens 20 minutes into its second flight from Jakarta. The crew last spoke to ground control while over Mt. Halimun Salak National Park in West Java province, the Rossiya 24 television network reported. "Before communication was lost with the plane, there was no information about the malfunction of the systems," said Vladimir Prisyazhnyuk, president of Moscow-based Sukhoi Civil Aircraft Co. "The plane has conducted about 500 flights with the overall flight time over 800 hours [and]

They are selling secrets along the shining corridors of the Savyolovsky Market: Unlisted numbers. Tax returns. Customs declarations. Wanted lists. Police reports. Car registrations. Business permits. Wrenched from the bowels of government by the forces of runaway capitalism and corruption, the hush-hush databases have made their way to this market in central Moscow where the windows of tiny shops glitter with cellphones, pirated DVDs and porn. Compressed on discs, frozen in Cyrillic letters, is a trove of petty squabbles and personal tragedies that make up the fabric of this vast and often lawless land.

Nikolai Polissky brings to mind the great Russian writer Ivan Turgenev, who always set his tales of village life in all its hardships and folklore against landscapes of hauntingly natural beauty ("Hope in a Russian Haystack," Sept. 11). These antithetical juxtapositions underscored the ironies of life and inevitabilities of fate in the lives of his characters. No, the snowmen and the basket-weave towers offer no practical solutions to the problems of those who inhabit Nikola-Lenivets, but like all important works of art, they draw the viewer into an alternate reality, apparently much needed, although at times underappreciated by the people of this former Soviet enclave.

I just read the article "Moscow on the Pacific" and I thought it was wonderful [May 10]. Charlie Amter definitely did his research on places to go and things to see. I haven't seen such a positive article regarding Russians in the American press in a long time and, of course, being Russian and seeing a big article in the L.A. Times that doesn't talk about mafia makes me very happy. DINA GONTAR Reseda

Re "U.S. asks: How far will Russia go?," Aug. 11 Here we go again. The Russians are coming, blasting their way south through South Ossetia. According to Russian U.N. Ambassador Vitaly Churkin, Georgian President Mikheil Saakashvili "must go" because he has become "an obstacle." "Regime change," Churkin says, is an "American expression." Why then doesn't the Russian government urge the residents of South Ossetia to undertake a nonviolent, mass effort to remove Saakashvili from office and elect a responsible leader?

A national shame. An abject absurdity; a circus stunt. And a waste of money besides. In the old days, the organizers would've been jailed. Or maybe shot. Former officials of Russia's spy agencies and analysts are heaping scorn on the alleged espionage operation in the United States rolled up this week by the FBI. What it showed more than anything, they said in interviews Thursday, is the pitiful state of spy craft in the Federal Security Service, the successor to the feared KGB. Vladimir Putin has tried during his decade in power to rebuild the Russian spy services, which disintegrated along with the Soviet Union.

Russia's president acknowledged today that growing violence in the impoverished southern republic of Ingushetia is rooted in unresolved domestic problems such as corruption and poverty. The statement was a stark admission of the deep and ominous troubles tearing at the Caucasus -- and a departure for an administration that has generally preferred to downplay the violence in its restive southern republics or, when pressed, to blame the bloodshed on foreign meddling. "You talked about the influence of a number of factors, including international ones such as funding of terrorists, religious extremism.

MOSCOW - Russia may consider a preemptive strike on a missile defense system in Europe if the U.S.-led NATO project continues as planned, a top official said Thursday. Russian Chief of General Staff Nikolai Makarov, in a sign of the tension between Russia and the United States over the missile defense plans, said during an international conference that a strike by his country might be possible. "A decision to use destructive force preemptively will be taken if the situation worsens," Makarov said.

CHICAGO — Batteries made in America for America and backed by America. That's how politicians hailed Ener1. The company tapped the country's top scientists at Argonne National Lab in Illinois, and U.S. taxpayers pledged up to $118 million in federal stimulus funds and $80 million in state and local incentives to help Ener1 produce cutting-edge battery technology for electric cars and the U.S. military. "This is about the future. And the question is which nation is going to seize the future.

MOSCOW — Tens of thousands of people came to the square in front of a Moscow cathedral Sunday in a show of support for the Russian Orthodox Church, which is facing criticism for its close ties to the Kremlin and the wealth of its leaders. Under golden cupolas and a warm spring sun, church leaders dressed in red-and-gold robes carried crosses and icons around the mighty white walls of Christ the Savior Cathedral in a procession led by Patriarch Kirill. "What are we doing, my dears, here today, having gathered in such a multitude?"

KARABANOVO, Russia - His unruly mane of white hair giving him the look of Moses, Father Georgy Edelstein struggled over the grayish snow that is the late-spring landscape of this barren village, heading to his church for Good Friday services. When he got to its small, darkened main hall, the 79-year-old put a simple silver cross over his robes and began saying prayers on one of the holiest days in the Russian Orthodox Church. His audience: his assistant and one villager. Two days later, the leader of the Russian Orthodox Church, Patriarch Kirill, exchanged hearty Easter kisses with President-elect Vladimir Putin amid the lavish interiors of Moscow's Christ the Savior Cathedral, his jewel-encrusted cross and gold brocade robe shining in the television limelight.

NEW YORK — A federal court judge sentenced convicted Russian arms dealer Viktor Bout to 25 years in prison on Thursday, but in a swipe at prosecutors said there was no convincing evidence that he would have committed crimes they alleged if he had not been the target of a sting operation. Judge Shira Scheindlin gave the 45-year-old Bout, known as the "Merchant of Death," the minimum mandatory sentence for conspiring to acquire and use antiaircraft missiles. She also sentenced him to 15 years on three other counts of conspiracy to kill Americans and conspiracy to provide material support to a terrorist organization, the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia, known as FARC.

For more than a year, Russia has prohibited its government-run museums from sending artworks to exhibitions in the United States. The ban has frustrated and puzzled American museum officials, because it was spurred by a legal decision unrelated to anything the museums themselves have done. Diplomacy has failed to lift it. Hopes have risen recently that the impasse can be broken by a bipartisan bill that passed unopposed in the U.S. House of Representativeson March 19 and is pending in the Senate judiciary committee.

Kellogg Co. acquired Russian cookie company United Bakers Group. The maker of Corn Flakes and other cereals didn't disclose the purchase price, saying it wouldn't have a material effect on income this year. United had sales of about $100 million last year and almost 4,000 employees, Kellogg said.

Re "Russians Leave Germany Minus Fond Farewells," June 26: The proper comparison, on the apples for apples principle, is to compare the 339,000 troops plus the 211,000 dependents and civilian support personnel the former Soviet Union kept in the former East Germany with the several hundred thousand troops and dependents the U.S., Britain and France kept in West Germany, and the conclusion would have been that there indeed was a near parity of...

MOSCOW - The only thing missing from the scene was one of those heroic images of Lenin peering from a shop window, or perhaps a glimpse of the Soviet hammer and sickle fluttering over the nearby Kremlin. When the new U.S. ambassador to Russia arrived this week for a private meeting with a prominent human rights activist, he was confronted by a crew from a Kremlin-controlled television station that blocked his path and peppered him with questions. Uniformed men, tall wool military hats on their heads, were there too. And a burly civilian held up a sign with a pointed question for Ambassador Michael McFaul's host: "What is the price of the motherland today?"

U.S. politics combined with diplomacy as Russian President Dmitri Medvedev took a swipe at Mitt Romney and President Obama, pointing to an uncooperative Congress and a toxic political environment at home to explain why he was delaying negotiations with Russian leaders over missile defense. Romney, in a CNN interview Monday, had referred to Russia as "our No. 1 geopolitical foe," prompting Medvedev to tell reporters here that the Republican front-runner's language seemed out of date and "smelled of Hollywood" stereotypes.