Word: russianizing
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When BMW was looking for a place to roll out its new top-of-the-range 7 Series model, one country immediately came to mind: Russia. Demand for luxury autos has been soaring there - BMW's Russian sales have quadrupled in the past five years and were up 54% last year alone. So the German automaker threw a splashy party in Moscow on July 8, unveiling its revamped model inside a 40-ft.-high (12 m) acrylic-and-steel hourglass that it erected on Red Square itself. The show "reflects the confidence that the BMW Group has in this country...
...question now is whether this international love affair with Russia as a place to do business can continue. The shooting war in Georgia this month sent investors in Russian stocks rushing for the exit: the RTS stock index has sunk to its lowest level since November 2006 and is down 32% in the last three months. The fighting was the most deadly sign that Russia is not a predictable or stable investment environment, but it was by no means the only one. Along with the new geopolitical uncertainties, foreign businesses and investors are also grappling with signs of economic vulnerability...
...Western companies are talking publicly about revising their Russian investment strategies in the wake of the war with Georgia, and Russia watchers are sharply divided over whether there will be a medium- or long-term impact on economic ties with the West. BMW, for one, is proceeding apace with building its sales network there: by the end of this year, it aims to have a dealership in 47 Russian cities with populations of more than 300,000. One of the biggest corporate-investment programs, by Italy's Enel - which has spent about $6 billion on an effort to become...
...Georgia's decision to step up attacks two weeks ago on Ossetian positions in Tskhinvali - a decision that, some observers say, gave the Russians a pretext to invade - he responds: "There was no choice. The choice was either resist or don't resist and watch Russia overrun our country and come all the way to the capital." Russia's ambitions, he explains later, are not restricted to South Ossetia. "They came for all of Georgia," he says. "They saw that we are prospering here and they wanted to put an end to that." And, of course, there was the international...
...Nevertheless, he hasn't lost hope. "To roll back aggression takes time. But they should know that it is going to happen." Still, "Georgia on its own can't roll back Russian aggression. The real solution is to make sure that Russia can't get away with this. They are convinced that after a while the rest of the world will just forget what happened here. That can't happen...