Infinite Unknown

Nov. 5 (Bloomberg) — Russian leader Dmitry Medvedev said he would deploy new missiles in Europe, confronting the U.S. on the day Barack Obama was declared the winner in America’s presidential election.

Medvedev said he would place a short-range missile system designed to carry conventional warheads in Russia’s exclave of Kaliningrad, wedged between Poland and Lithuania.

“An Iskander rocket system will be deployed in the Kaliningrad region to neutralize the missile-defense system if necessary,” Medvedev said, referring to U.S. plans to place elements of a missile shield in Poland and the Czech Republic.

Medvedev blamed the U.S. for failure to coordinate its economic policy with other countries so that a “local” crisis turned into a global one, leading to “a fall on the markets of the whole planet.” He also renewed his assertion that the U.S. provoked the war between Russia and Georgia in August.

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Tags: China, Dmitry Medvedev, financial crisis, Georgia, India, Lithuania, Mikhail Saakashvili, Military, missile shield, NATO, Poland, Politics, Russia, South Ossetia

Russia’s financial crisis is escalating with lightning speed as foreigners pull funds from the country and the debt markets start to price a serious risk of sovereign default.

S&P has cut its outlook for Russia, which has been propping up the rouble: a man on a phone passes a board displaying currency exchange rates in Moscow Photo: Reuters

Russia’s financial crisis is escalating with lightning speed as foreigners pull funds from the country and the debt markets start to price a serious risk of sovereign default.

The cost of insuring Russian bonds against bankruptcy rocketed to extreme levels yesterday. Spreads on credit default swaps (CDS) reached 1,123, higher than Iceland’s debt before it sought a rescue from the International Monetary Fund.

Moves by Hungary, Ukraine and Belarus to seek emergency loans from the IMF have now set off a dangerous chain reaction across Eastern Europe.

Romania had to raise overnight interest rates to 900pc on Wednesday to stem capital flight, recalling the wild episodes of Europe’s ERM crisis in 1992. The CDS spreads on Ukraine’s debt have topped 2,800, signalling total revulsion by investors.

Rating agency Standard & Poor’s issued a downgrade alert on Russian bonds yesterday, warning that a series of state rescue packages worth $200bn (£124bn) could start to erode the credit-worthiness of the state.

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Tags: debt, Derivatives, Derivatives market, Dmitry Medvedev, financial crisis, Hungary, IMF, Romania, Russia, Standard & Poor's, Ukraine

Oct. 8 (Bloomberg) — Russia, Indonesia, Ukraine and Romania shut their stock exchanges after shares plummeted in the worst week for emerging-markets in at least two decades.

Russia’s Micex Index dropped 14 percent, having already slumped 20 percent this week, before trading stopped at 11:05 a.m. in Moscow. The exchange won’t reopen until Oct. 10 unless the Federal Financial Markets Service says otherwise, Micex spokesman Alexei Gerasyuk said by phone. The Jakarta Composite index fell 21 percent in its biggest weekly slump in at least 25 years, according to data compiled by Bloomberg.

Investors are fleeing on concern the worsening global credit crisis will cause more banks to collapse and push the global economy into recession, lowering the price of the commodities that drive developing nation economies. The benchmark MSCI Emerging Markets index is headed for its worst weekly decline since it was established in 1987 after falling 21 percent.

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Tags: Dmitry Medvedev, Economy, Indonesia, Politics, Romania, Russia, Stock Market, Ukraine

Russia will stage its largest air force war games since Soviet times next week in the latest stage of the Kremlin’s strategy to show off the country as a military superpower reborn.

Their progress watched closely by increasingly jittery western militaries, dozens of nuclear bombers will take part in the exercise. Tu-95 Bear bombers will fire cruise missiles at targets in sub-Arctic Russia for the first time since 1984.

While Russia insists that the war games are not meant as a gesture of aggression, the West is growing increasingly uneasy about the scale of the manoeuvres.

The aerial exercises, which will take place close to American airspace in Alaska, are part of a month-long war game known as Stability 2008 that Russia claims is the biggest for 20 years.

As the bombers take to the air next week, Russian ships will also be conducting exercises in the North Sea and the Baltic as well as in the Atlantic and Pacific Oceans. A flotilla of war ships is also sailing to the Caribbean for joint exercises with Venezuela, Washington’s greatest foe in South America, which will come within a few hundred miles of the US coastline.

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Tags: Dmitry Medvedev, Government, Military, Politics, Russia

Dmitry Medvedev, the Russian president, yesterday vowed to defy Western attempts to isolate Moscow as he gave his backing to an ambitious re-armament programme.

Both Mr Medvedev and Vladimir Putin, the prime minister, resorted to the language of the Cold War as they pledged to increase defence spending by 50 per cent over the next three years.

But they also sought to portray Russia as the victim of Nato aggression.

As his parliament gave its support to the higher defence budget, Mr Medvedev accused the United States and its allies of seeking to isolate Russia behind “thick walls and an iron curtain.”

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Tags: Dmitry Medvedev, Georgia, Government, Military, NATO, Politics, Russia, U.S., Vladimir Putin

President Dmitry Medvedev said that Russia should unilaterally claim part of the Arctic, stepping up the race for the disputed energy-rich region.

The expedition to plant a Russian flag on the seabed beneath the ice of the North Pole last August Photo: REUTERS

“We must finalise and adopt a federal law on the southern border of Russia’s Arctic zone,” Mr Medvedev told a meeting of the Security Council, in remarks carried by Interfax news agency.

“This is our responsibility, and simply our direct duty, to our descendents,” he said. “We must surely, and for the long-term future, secure Russia’s interests in the Arctic.”

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Tags: Dmitry Medvedev, Government, Politics, Russia, Vladimir Putin

Mr Medvedev said he hoped lessons would be learned from August’s events

Russian President Dmitry Medvedev has described Georgia’s assault on South Ossetia as Russia’s 9/11.

He said the world had learnt lessons from the attacks in the US on 11 September 2001 and hoped the same would happen after events in the Caucasus.

Reports say Russian troops are showing signs of preparing to pull back from inside Georgia.

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Tags: 9/11, Abkhazia, Condoleezza Rice, Dmitry Medvedev, France, Georgia, Mikhail Saakashvili, Military, Nicolas Sarkozy, OSCE, Politics, Russia, South Ossetia, U.N., U.S.

MOSCOW - Russia said Monday it will send a naval squadron and long-range patrol planes to Venezuela this year for a joint military exercise in the Caribbean, an announcement made at a time of increasingly tense relations with the United States.

The apparently retaliatory move follows the U.S. deployment of warships to deliver aid to the former Soviet nation of Georgia, barely a month after Russian armor and aircraft crushed the Georgian military in a five-day war.

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Tags: Dmitry Medvedev, Georgia, Government, Hugo Chavez, Military, Politics, Russia, South Ossetia, U.S., Venezuela, Vladimir Putin

MOSCOW (Reuters) - Russian President Dmitry Medvedev accused the United States on Saturday of provoking Moscow by using warships to deliver relief aid to its ally Georgia, with which Russia fought a brief war last month.

“I wonder how they would feel if we now dispatched humanitarian assistance to the Caribbean, suffering from a hurricane, using our navy,” Medvedev said, adding that a whole U.S. fleet had been dispatched to deliver the aid.

Russia has also accused U.S. warships of rearming Tbilisi’s defeated army, a charge dismissed as “ridiculous” by Washington.

NATO in turn has rejected talk of a buildup of its warships in the Black Sea, saying their recent presence in the region was part of routine exercises.

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Tags: Abkhazia, Dmitry Medvedev, Georgia, Military, NATO, OSCE, Politics, Russia, South Ossetia, U.S.

(BBC NEWS) Russian President Dmitry Medvedev has described his Georgian counterpart as a “political corpse”, saying Moscow does not recognise him as president.

“President Saakashvili no longer exists in our eyes. He is a political corpse,” he told Italy’s Rai television.

He said US support for Mr Saakashvili had helped provoke the crisis, which has seen Russian troops invade Georgia.

He said Russia did not fear isolation by Western countries that have condemned the Russian intervention.

Fighting between Russia and Georgia began on 7 August after the Georgian military tried to retake the breakaway region of South Ossetia by force.

Russian forces launched a counter-attack and the conflict ended with the ejection of Georgian troops from both South Ossetia and Abkhazia.

Russia has since recognised the independence of both regions, though no other country has.

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Tags: Abkhazia, Dmitry Medvedev, Georgia, Government, Mikhail Saakashvili, Military, NATO, Politics, Russia, South Ossetia, U.S., Vladimir Putin