Word: russianizing
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Other notable users of U.S. shell companies: Viktor Bout, the notorious Russian arms trafficker; the Sinaloa drug-trafficking cartel; and Semion Mogilevich, the "brainy don" of Russian mafia dons, recently named on the FBI's Ten Most Wanted Fugitives List. "Each of these examples involves the relatively rare instance in which law enforcement identified the perpetrator misusing the U.S. shell companies," senior Justice Department official, Jennifer Shasky, told a Senate panel recently. Added a senior Treasury official before the same hearing of the Senate Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Committee: "Years of research and law-enforcement investigations have conclusively demonstrated...
...only major stakes NASA has left in the manned space game, and postshuttle it will be the only one. For a while the U.S. won't even have a way to go back and forth between the ISS and earth without hitching a ride on a Russian ship. The station was proposed in 1984 and has been under construction since 1998, and so far not a lick of truly valuable science has come from it. Its intended mission has changed and changed and changed again over the years, from materials manufacturing to zero-g experiments to astronomic observations to studying...
...quarrel began typically enough. Belarus, like many ex-Soviet countries, has enjoyed subsidized oil and gas supplies from Russia for two decades, in part to ensure its loyalty after the collapse of the Soviet Union. It has even been allowed to buy Russian crude oil on the cheap, refine it at home and sell it on to Europe at a huge profit. But in the past three years, Belarusian President Alexander Lukashenko has started to assert his independence in subtle ways. Following the 2008 Russia-Georgia war, Lukashenko declined to recognize the breakaway Georgian republics of South Ossetia and Abkhazia...
...Then late last year, the spat escalated when Russia decided that Belarus no longer deserved its energy subsidies. When the two countries' existing oil contract expired on Dec. 31, Russia demanded additional payments of a whopping $2.5 billion, which amounts to about 5% of Belarus' entire economy. The Russian government also hinted that in order to keep oil prices down, Belarus should give Moscow a stake in its energy infrastructure - namely the oil refineries it uses to process oil for resale to Europe. This would play into Russia's larger aim of controlling the energy supply chain from...
...Belarus is most likely a bluff. It would be costly and difficult for Kazakhstan to ship oil to Belarus, and Belarus could not afford to pay fair-market prices anyway, says Denis Borisov, an analyst at Bank Moskvy, one of Russia's largest banks. Kazakh companies could, however, undercut Russian bids for the Naftan refinery, he says, which would be a major blow to Russia's energy strategy in Eastern Europe. (See pictures of the Russia-vs.-Georgia...