Head of the Federal Environmental, Technological, and Nuclear Surveillance Service of the Russian Federation Nikolai Kutyin confirmed a timetable for carrying out scheduled inspections of various Russian enterprises in 2010. For one, the Service’s head office and its regional branches are going to carry out thorough inspections of OAO NK Rosneft, OOO Evraz Holding, OAO Uralkhim, OAO Lukoil, and OAO Gazprom. The companies will be checked for compliance with the industrial safety requirements. As it happens, an explosion occurred at Evraz’s Yestyuninskaya mine based in Nizhniy Tagil, Sverdlovsk

‘Setting up hubs is a common thing among foreign airports. Given Koltsovo Airport’s advantageous geographical position and Sverdlovsk Region’s economic situation, we’ve got some excellent prospects for developing into a hub. Small airports are really having a hard time because they have to transfer passengers to Moscow first and only then take them further. Koltsovo, however, intends to compete with Moscow airports by eliminating the connecting flights problems. It’s obvious that connecting flights through Moscow have a number of drawbacks, particularly geographical ones,’ General Director of

‘Last year was rather difficult for our business. An airport is a sort of an acid test for a region’s economy: once the metallurgical, machine-building, and other regional industries have faced the hard times, our passenger turnover decreased by 14.2%,’ General Director of Yekaterinburg’s Koltsovo Airport Evgeniy Chudnovskiy announced at a recent press conference in Yekaterinburg. The airport reports the number of sorties dropped by 15.9% in 2009 compared two 2008 and reached 13,798 sorties altogether. The passenger turnover totaled to 2,169,136 people last year; the number of people using