UrBC, Yekaterinburg, March 7, 2018. Ural Airlines are inviting Yekaterinburg travelers to come to Israel to take part in the Easter celebrations in the Holy Land. The air carrier operates Israel-bound flights from Moscow Region’s Zhukovsky Airport, Saint Petersburg, Yekaterinburg, Krasnodar, Samara, Sochi, and Myneralnye Vody, the airline’s press service says. Special offer holds for the company’s Samara-Tel Aviv-Samara and Tel Aviv-Samara-Tel Aviv flights: if you book ten tickets, one more person can go free (the 11th passenger only pays the $26.81 fee). The 10+1 offer holds on March

UrBC, Magnitogorsk, March 7, 2018. Magnitogorsk Iron & Steel Works (MMK) keeps working on a new slime processing unit for its Crushing & Processing Plant 5, MMK Information, PR & Advertising Department reports. ‘The idea to process the slimes coming from a man-made deposit (mostly our ore mining and processing enterprise’s byproducts from the fifties and the sixties) took root some fifteen years ago. Experts from our Central Lab determined that the slime storage facility contains a fair amount of useful iron ore concentrate. In 2015, it was decided to have this deposit processed

UrBC, Yekaterinburg, March 7, 2018. KORTROS Group’s RSG-Akademicheskoye’s newly appointed Director-General Viktor Krivoshein assumed office Monday, the company press service reports. Viktor G. Krivoshein was born in Perm in 1966. He graduated from Perm Polytechnic and started his first job as a researcher in Kaliningrad (now Korolev), Moscow Region. He then worked as a civil servant in the construction and housing services sector. He was appointed Head of Perm Territory’s Urban Planning & Infrastructure Development Ministry’s Infrastructure Development Department in 2006. In 2007, he

UrBC, Yekaterinburg, March 7, 2018. Viktor Kisselev was recently appointed Chair of the Board of Directors at RSG-Akademicheskoye (part of KORTROS Group), the company press service reports. Kisselev was the company’s Director-General in 2015-2017. ‘Given his experience, Viktor Kisselev will be in charge of the company’s strategic projects and development. This includes working with the social infrastructure facilities in the area and building the innovative medical cluster (the first building that will house a fertility/maternity clinic - is already under construction),’ the press service

UrBC, Yekaterinburg, March 7, 2018. Ural Airlines are introducing a new flight from Moscow’s Domodedovo Airport to Frankfurt-am-Main, the air carrier’s press service reports. The flight will be operating five times a week, Monday to Friday, starting from May 28, 2018. Departure from Moscow: 10:45 AM; arrival in Frankfurt: 12:55 PM; departure from Frankfurt: 6:05 PM; arrival in Moscow: 10:10 PM (in-flight time: 3 hours and 10 minutes). Prices start from €82 (one way) and from €180 (round trip), all fees included. ‘Frankfurt is a major European air and terrestrial travel hub. A direct flight

UrBC, Yekaterinburg, March 6, 2018. Thousands of MegaFon Ural’s customers bought two smartphones for the price of one while the company’s special offer was running, thus making Xiaomi Redmi Note A5 February’s absolute mobile device market leader. Every one in three customers purchased this particular make at MegaFon’s outlet, the company press service reports. Locals of Yekaterinburg, Novouralsk, Perm, Tyumen, Surgut, Chelyabinsk, Novy Urengoy, and Nizhnevartovsk tended to buy more actively than others, so these cities topped the sales ratings. The majority of the purchases were made on

UrBC, Yekaterinburg, March 6, 2018. Two drones are now operating at Raspadskaya Coal Company’s Raspadskaya Mine, EVRAZ Holding Ural’s press service reports. The equipment is meant to enhance both the speediness and the safety of survey measurements and calculation precision. ‘A drone can take up to 500 photographs of any part of the mine in under thirty minutes. The photos will then be fed into a special software program that will create a 3D model of the relief in just one hour. This used to take up to two days before,’ the press service says. A quadcopter can do its aerial mapping at the

UrBC, Yekaterinburg, March 6, 2018. Sverdlovsk Region’s residents signed 987 co-investment agreements in the building cooperative sector in January 2018, Rosreestr’s website states. In December 2017, the figure stood at 1,923 agreements. 13,863 agreements got signed in the Mid-Urals in the course of last year altogether, compared with 12,972 in 2016.

UrBC, Yekaterinburg, March 6, 2018. Two Boeing 747 aircraft loaded with 160,000 kg of flowers from Belgium and the Netherlands arrived in Yekaterinburg in time for International Women’s Day, V.A. Sorokin Koltsovo Customs’ press service reports. According to the service, some of the flowers originally came from Spain, Kenia, Columbia, Thailand, Ecuador, Italy, and Ethiopia. Ecuador actually once again proved Yekaterinburg’s No.1 flower supplier this year. ‘These are the familiar roses, chrysanthemums, gerber daisies, and the exotic tropical samples. Before the flowers get to the stores, they

UrBC, Yekaterinburg, March 6, 2018. Russia’s Prime Minister Dmitri Medvedev signed a decree to include Yekaterinburg-Chelyabinsk High-Speed Rail in the national road and rail planning scheme; the paper is now available on the official legal information portal. According to the scheme, the railroad link will connect Beloyarsky, Aramid, and Sysert in Sverdlovsk Region to Kasli, Sosnovsky, Kunashaksky, and Krasnoarmeysky in Chelyabinsk Region. The plan means Yekaterinburg-Passazhirskiy Station, Shartash Station, and Chelyabinsk Main Station will all have to get reconstructed. There will also

UrBC, Moscow, March 5, 2018. MegaFon is now the Speedtest Award winner for Fastest Mobile Network according to Ookla, the global Internet speed test leader, the telecommunications provider’s press service reports. Based on speed testing results provided by Ookla’s Russian users of Speedtest app, MegaFon proved the ISP with the highest-speed mobile Internet connection in the second and third quarters of 2017. The data downloading speed came to 25.04 Mb/sec on average. Ookla looked into data from over 7,900 speed tests of all ISPs taken on 1,200 LTE-supporting devices. ‘MegaFon makes a special

UrBC, Yekaterinburg, March 5, 2018. Ural Airlines are already selling tickets for their new international Vladivostok-Beijing-Vladivostok flight (to be made available starting March 28, 2018), the air carrier’s press service reports. According to the airline, the flight is two hours and forty minutes long; flight U6 803 will be operated three times a week. ‘Travelers arriving in Beijing will find there the mysterious and magnificent masterpieces of the Chinese: the Great Chinese Wall, the Forbidden City, the Temple of Confucius, the Summer Palace, the Temple of Heaven, and much else besides.

UrBC, Yekaterinburg, March 5, 2018. Sverdlovsk Region’s residents had 5,544 homes privatized last year, including 5,348 apartments and 196 rooms in communal apartments, Sverdlovskstat reports. Earlier on, as many as 28,121 homes got privatized in 2013, 10,941 in 2014, 14,429 in 2015, and 7,093 in 2016. All in all, 1.327m housing units have been privatized in Sverdlovsk Region so far.

UrBC, Yekaterinburg, March 5, 2018. Sverdlovsk Region Government’s debt decreased by 6.3% in January-February 2018, the government’s Information Policy Department reports. The constituency’s debt went from RUR 75.6bn on January 1, 2018 down to RUR 69.6bn on March 1, 2018. As to the debt’s structure, the share of marketable obligations dropped by 2.5%, while the share of debts related to loans provided from the federal funds reached 29.7%. Sverdlovsk Region’s Finance Ministry Galina Kulachenko announced earlier that the constituency’s debt would be fully paid off two years than initially

UrBC, Yekaterinburg, March 5, 2018. Prices went up by 0.9% on Yekaterinburg’s existing home prices compared with the beginning of the year, Ural Chamber of Real Estate’s analytical report states. Existing home prices rose by 0.3% in Yekaterinburg in the last twelve months. However, the average figures are down 11.5% against February 2015. Asking prices currently come to RUR 67,855 per m2 on average. In general, prices haven’t tended to decline this year so far, regardless of the housing type. Studio apartments grew 1.1% more expensive in the first two months of the year, with asking price at

UrBC, Yekaterinburg, March 2, 2018. EVRAZ Holding’s Kachkanar Ore Mining & Processing Enterprise (KGOK) had a new machine vision system installed at its palletizing department, EVRAZ Holding Ural’s Corporate Relations Center reports. The new system is meant to control the quality of pellets and boost the indurating machines’ productivity by 7,000,000 kg a year, as well as to cut down on the plant’s natural gas spending. ‘The fully automated system allows for contactless measurement of pellet parameters in four indurating machines. Every machine is fitted with four granulometer units, each

UrBC, Yekaterinburg, March 2, 2018. Ural HR Forum will be held in Yekaterinburg this March with support from the Ural Bank for Reconstruction & Development (UBRD); the forum will be dedicated to employee interaction at every stage from selection and recruitment to efficiency appraisal, the bank’s press service reports. Twenty speakers from Russia’s leading companies such as MTS, Danone Russia, HeadHunter, Beeline, Sberbank, and Ural Federal University will present their reports at the forum. The event will be held at the Angelo Hotel at 55A Bakhchivandzhi St from 10 AM to 6 PM. Ural HR

UrBC, Magnitogorsk, March 2, 2018. The year 2017 proved a special one for Magnitogorsk Iron & Steel Works (MMK) thanks to a number of new production records set last year, the company press service reports. The plant’s hot-roll Mill 2500 reached a 180m-tons-of hot-rolled-metal-goods point last February after the initial launch in 1960. This rolling mill, one of MMK’s largest, is currently being reconstructed (with all the renovation jobs to be completed by 2020). This is expected to raise the mill’s production output from 3.6m tons to 5m tons a year. MMK is also planning to build a new

UrBC, Yekaterinburg, March 2, 2018. VTB Bank is coordinating Investor Day at the Hyatt Regency Yekaterinburg Hotel on March 3, 2018; the event begins at noon, the bank’s press service reports. Moscow Exchange and VTB Group’s leading experts, members of VTB shareholders’ counseling committee, investment companies representatives, and private investors are going to share their relevant investment ideas. VTB Group will present its financial performance report for the year 2017. Visitors to the workshop will learn about the bank’s new stage of business development and about its shareholder

UrBC, Yekaterinburg, March 2, 2018. Ural Airlines are starting a new, scheduled flight from Khabarovsk to Sochi, with a stopover in Irkutsk, on May 28, 2018, the air carrier’s press service reports. The flights will be operated on a weekly basis, so Russians living in the Far East and Siberia will be able to get to Sochi as fast as possible: the time in the air is now down by as many as three hours. U6 160 Khabarovsk-Irkutsk-Sochi will be available on Mondays, U6 159 Sochi-Irkutsk-Khabarovsk on Sundays. Prices start from RUR 15,715 for Khabarovsk-Sochi flights and from RUR 12,640 for