Best week since early June. The weekly fund flow report from EPFR Global shows improving flows into Russia funds and, although one snow flake doesn't make a winter, it adds to the build up of optimism that investors are looking

Russian financial markets are expected to recover from the crisis later than the global markets, Yekaterina Trofimova, head of Standard & Poor's division for Russian bank ratings, said in an interview with PRIME-TASS.

The economic decline is expected to be over soon in Russia, but several years will be required to return to pre-crisis levels, World Bank (WB) Vice President for Europe and Central Asia Shigeo Katsu said in an interview with Prime-Tass.

Revised RTS Fair Value level to 1,032 - consolidation at this level is justified before market pushes to new highs later in the year.

The Russia-US summit will mainly be about big-picture geopolitics, but there are also some angles that should offer both long-term and near-term investment opportunities to both strategic and portfolio investors. Most of these are in the areas of private equity

The problem of bad debt will intensify in Russia's banking sector in August-September during a peak in debt redemptions, Pavel Teplukhin, managing director of investment banking group Troika Dialog, said in an interview with Prime-Tass.

The World Bank is prepared to provide Russia with appropriate financing in 2010, Klaus Rohland, the World Bank's Country Director for Russia, said in an interview with Prime-Tass.

The International Finance Corporation (IFC), which is part of the World Bank Group, does not have major problems with non-performing loans in Russia amid the global economic meltdown, IFC Executive Vice President and CEO Lars Thunell said in an interview

Better tone expected. The latest two day Russia-EU summit opened today in the city of Khabarovsk, the administrative capital of the Far Eastern Federal District. Both sides will come to the summit with some legacy baggage but the tone should

Prime Minister's hopeful message. Prime Minister Vladimir Putin today delivered a report to the lower house of parliament, the Duma, on the measures taken by government to address the economic crisis. There was very little new in his speech. His

Russia's largest refractory materials producer Magnezit plans to immediately repay half of its second, 2.5 billion ruble bond issue as a part of a planned restructuring, the group's CEO Sergei Odegov said in an interview with Prime-Tass.

Russia's Federal Customs Service projects its collections for the federal budget to fall to 2.78 trillion rubles in 2009 from 4.695 trillion rubles in 2008, considering the unfavorable economic environment, Boris Shkurkin, director of the service's department for federal customs

Russian aluminum giant United Company RUSAL is anticipating weak demand for aluminum to continue into 2010, but the company believes it is well positioned to weather the global financial turmoil, Sergei Belsky, RUSAL's director of sales, said in a recent

Russian insurance company ROSNO completed the largest restructuring in the company's history in 2008, ROSNO CEO Hannes Chopra told Prime-Tass in a recent interview.

Russian banks do not have acute liquidity problems, the Central Bank of Russia's (CBR) First Deputy Chairman Alexei Ulyukayev said in an interview with Prime-Tass.

Russia will ship its first LNG from Sakhalin tomorrow. That will mark the entry of Gazprom into a new business line and signal Russia's intention to be an important, if not dominant, player in the growing LNG business. Below is

The Russian government may either decide within two months on providing subordinated loans to struggling banks or make an alternative decision within six months on investing in bank stocks, Deputy Prime Minister and Finance Minister Alexei Kudrin said in an

Russia's dollar fixation is a big part of the risk perception problem and one of the reasons why assets trade at a discount.

The Central Bank has announced that it is ending its practice of "gradual devaluation" for the ruble. As a parting shot it has announced that it will move the weakest end of the benchmark basket to 41.0 from tomorrow morning.

Two new gas deals have been signed by the representatives of Russia and Ukraine and, Tuesday morning, gas exports to Europe via the Ukraine pipeline resumed. The new contracts will run for ten years. Following one last year of discount