UrBC, Yekaterinburg, December 25, 2018. Ural Airlines bought yet another Airbus A321 on a lease within the framework of the company’s fleet renovation program; the air carrier thus now operates forty-seven Airbus planes all in all. The aircraft, now known as VQ-BGX, used to get operated by a British airline. There are 220 Economy seats available on board. ’This new purchase is meant to be used on both international and domestic flights. The first scheduled flight this Airbus is going to make will be Yekaterinburg-Tbilisi one, the airline’s press service says. Ural Airlines and Airbus have

UrBC, Yekaterinburg, December 24, 2018. A passenger flying with Ural Airlines proved the 6,000,000th customer of Yekaterinburg’s Koltsovo Airport. Anastasia Shamshurina was flying from Yekaterinburg to Mineralnye Vody (flight U6 305), the air carrier’s press service reports. The solemn awarding ceremony took place at Koltsovo International Airport on December 21. Upon reaching Terminal A, Ms Shamshurina was greeted by the airport and the airline representatives and received a free flight voucher: this can be used to get to any location Ural Airlines fly to and to get access to Koltsovo

UrBC, Yekaterinburg, December 24, 2018. Russians living in the Mid-Urals still owed the government RUB 2.5 billion in unpaid property tax as of December 1, 2018, Sverdlovsk Region’s division of Russia’s Federal Tax Service reports. The deadline for property tax payments for the year 2017 was December 3, 2018. Any taxpayer who failed to pay on time turned into a debtor as soon as the next day, December 4, 2018, which means the overall debt amount will be growing on a daily basis due to fines, the division explains. It was reported earlier that over 5,000 locals with unpaid taxes wouldn’t be

UrBC, Yekaterinburg, December 24, 2018. EVRAZ Holding’s Raspadskaya Coal Company presented Miners’ Healthcare Center in Leninsk-Kuznetsky with a Mercedes-Benz critical care transport ambulance; the CCT unit is fitted with all the modern critical care diagnostics equipment and intensive care/first-aid appliances. ‘The new CCT unit has a defibrillator, an ECG unit, inhalation anaesthesia unit and an artificial lung ventilator. There’s an ultrasonic air filter and the patient and team furniture fixtures. Doctors can now examine their patients and carry out resuscitation procedures if necessary

UrBC, Yekaterinburg, December 24, 2018. Czech Airlines a.s. (ČSA) that used to operate Yekaterinburg-Prague flights are leaving Yekaterinburg’s Koltsovo Airport in January 2019, Head of the Russian Tourism Industry Union’s Ural division Mikhail Maltsev refers to the airport as officially declaring. ‘Czech Airlines will, in fact, no longer operate any flights to or from Yekaterinburg: Koltsovo Airport has been formally notified of the decision. This is extremely bad news for Yekaterinburg’s travel industry as well as for the city’s overall image. This can also have long-term consequences far

UrBC, Yekaterinburg, December 24, 2018. Ural Airlines are celebrating their new flight to Kazakhstan with a special offer on their Zhukovsky-Almaty-Zhukovsky flights. According to the air carrier’s press service, prices stat from RUB 8,305 (one way) and from RUB 17,271 (round trip) for Economy tickets. Prices are subject to change depending on the currency exchange rate. The flights will be available daily starting December 24, 2018. Starting January 15, the flights will get operated five times a week: on Mondays, Wednesdays, Fridays, Saturdays, and Sundays. Flight U6 2463 (Zhukovsky-Almaty),

UrBC, Yekaterinburg, December 21, 2018. An additional building for Kindergarten 119 opened with a solemn ceremony in Yekaterinburg’s District Akademicheskiy today. The new kindergarten extension will invite in more than three hundred children aged three to five as soon as January 9. The opening ceremony was attended by Vice Mayor of Yekaterinburg for Social Policy Dmitri Baranov, Head of Yekaterinburg Council’s Education Department Ekaterina Sibirtseva, Deputy Head of District Leninsky Council for Social Issues Elena Beruashvili, and a number of Yekaterinburg Duma deputies. According to Head

UrBC, Yekaterinburg, December 21, 2018. EVRAZ Holding allocated more than RUB 1 million for the new medical equipment in Kachkanar’s and Nizhniy Tagil’s clinics, EVRAZ Holding Ural’s PR Department reports. Kachkanar Central Hospital now has two new semiautomatic analyzers, special-purpose sample cups, a set of chemical reagents, and supplies and appliances for lab blood testing. ‘The biochemistry analyzer has 99 different programs and can process 15 blood samples at a time. It only takes three minutes to get the test results ready. The hematology analyzer makes it possible to test a blood

UrBC, Magnitogorsk, December 21, 2018. Magnitogorsk Iron & Steel Works (MMK) member enterprise MRK won a prestigious Chelyabinsk Region award for its long-standing corporate social responsibility efforts. According to MMK’s Information, PR & Advertising Department, the state-run program on improving working conditions and job safety in Chelyabinsk Region in 2017-2020 got adopted last year, which was when the local labor and employment agency set up the Best Socially Responsible Employer of The Year Contest in Chelyabinsk Region. Under the terms of the contest, any organization or

UrBC, Yekaterinburg, December 21, 2018. Ural Federal District division of Rosprirodnadzor (the national environmental watchdog) is going to investigate the activity of Ural Mining & Metallurgical Company’s asset Svyatogor at Shemursky and Novo-Shemursky Deposits next year. ‘Rosprirodnadzor intends to carry out a number of additional checks regarding Svyatogor, take water samples at Shemursky and Novo-Shemursky Deposits, and inspect the sources of pollution there,’ the division informed UrBC. Earlier on, Rosprirodnadzor officers did a verification check of the conservation zones and water

UrBC, Yekaterinburg, December 21, 2018. Sverdlovsk Region’s coal and furnace oils reserves amounted to 1,155,400,000 kg and 171,400,000 kg, respectively, in early December. This was, respectively, 1.7 times and 5% less than one year earlier (in December 2017). According to Sverdlovskstat, the coal reserves available as of December 1, 2018 will be enough to keep local infrastructure facilities operating for twenty-eight days; the furnace oil stock is enough to keep them running for 962 days. The coal and furnace oil reserves of companies operating in the electric power, natural gas, and steam

UrBC, Magnitogorsk, December 20, 2018. Magnitogorsk Iron & Steel Works (MMK) Director for Job Safety, Industrial Safety & the Environment Grigory Shchurov spoke about MMK’s important environmental projects at a recent conference dedicated to environmental rehabilitation of the Ural River, the plant’s press service reports. Shchurov presented a report on Environmental Problems of Enterprises Affecting the Ural River/Environmental Projects & MMK’s Water Utilization System’s Problems and Potential. He said a large-scale water conservation project got completed in November; MMK

UrBC, Yekaterinburg, December 20, 2018. The telecommunications giant MegaFon installed more than a hundred new base 4G stations in the Urals this year, MegaFon Ural’s press service reports. ‘Every single hour, our network handles the amount of traffic that roughly equals to sending 6 million photographs. Taking care of comfortable data transfer is our priority. The best LTE coverage means our customers can solve any problems online both at home and while traveling around Russia,’ says MegaFon Ural’s Tech Director Anton Scherbakov. MegaFon’s engineers improved 4G connection quality in more

UrBC, Yekaterinburg, December 20, 2018. The Ural Bank for Reconstruction & Development (UBRD) and Mir Payment System are coordinating a special prize-drawing offer, the bank’s press service reports. UBRD Mir cardholders might win thousands of money prizes and even the grand prize of RUB 3 million (intended for an apartment) between December 15, 2018 and March 15, 2019. To join the prize-drawing offer, you need to sign up for the lottery on the bank’s website and then simply use your Mir card to make your regular payments (this applies to any transaction amounts and to online and offline

UrBC, Moscow, December 20, 2018. The bill On Changes in Articles 46, 54 of the Federal Communications Act was adopted by the State Duma in the third reading this week. Under the new changes, mobile carriers will now charge their customers the same amount of money regardless of which part of Russia the user is currently in. According to the lawmakers behind the bill, the national roaming, that is, charging mobile connection users more or less depending on which federal constituency (their ‘home’ one or otherwise) they are in is ‘essentially a very outdated practice that prevents communication

UrBC, Yekaterinburg, December 20, 2018. Jet Infosystems completed its multi-aspect information security audit of the Ural Bank for Reconstruction & Development’s payment systems. Based on the results of this audit, a set of short-term steps and a long-term strategy might get taken and adopted, respectively, in order to reduce fraud risks and improve the bank’s information security processes, the UBRD’s press service reports. The infosecurity audit touched upon ten of the bank’s payment systems, their system and application software configurations, and the firewall access control rules for

UrBC, Yekaterinburg, December 19, 2018. Making Polymeric Composite-Material Radio-transparent Radomes Used in Air Navigation Appliances for Civil Aviation Sector, a project submitted by CentroTech Scientific & Production Association (Rosatom/TVEL’s Novouralsk asset), won silver at the innovative project contest coordinated by N.Ye. Zhukovsky Central Aerohydrodynamic Institute (TsAGI), Rosatom’s Ural Electrochemical Combine’s press service reports. The contest finalists and winners were named during TsAGI’s celebrations dedicated to the college’s 100th birthday on December 6. The

UrBC, Magnitogorsk, December 19, 2018. Quantorium Children’s Tech Park opened at G.I. Nosov Magnitogorsk State Technical University as part of the federally run special-purpose program in the field of education development. The park got set up with support from Governor of Chelyabinsk Region and Magnitogorsk Iron & Steel Works (MMK). According to MMK’s Information, PR & Advertising Department, Quantorium Children’s Parks are free-of-charge, extracurricular training sites fitted with the most advanced equipment available. The goal is to help train new, highly skilled engineers as well

UrBC, Yekaterinburg, December 19, 2018. Miners from EVRAZ Raspadskaya Mine’s Section 17 extracted 2,000,000,000 kg of coal between January and late December this year; the first 1,000,000,000 kg got produced as early as July. According to Raspadskaya Coal Company’s PR Department, Alexei Ivanov’s team (head of Section 17: Sergey Vassilyev) extracted their 2,000,000,000 kg of valuable GZh coal from Long-Face 5а-7-32 that first got commissioned in December 2017. The miners rely on a highly efficient set of automated appliances and a Joy long wall shearer-loader, with the average daily long-face

UrBC, Chelyabinsk, December 19, 2018. Chelyabinsk Pipe Rolling Plant (ChelPipe) got issued a lifetime license for treating Class I-IV waste, ChelPipe Group’s press service reports. ‘The license was granted by Chelyabinsk Region division of the Federal Service for Supervision in the Sphere of Natural Resource Use (Rosprirodnadzor). Under the terms of the license, ChelPipe employees can now recycle, neutralize, and dispose of 13 different kinds of Hazard Class III-IV waste, including welding slag, emulsion varieties, and used oil,’ the press service says. In order to obtain the lifetime