Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy urges Russian troops to flee for their lives after his forces launch an offensive to retake southern areas, but Moscow says it has halted the attack, as fighting goes into its 189th day.
European governments fear Moscow could extend the outage in retaliation for Western sanctions imposed on it after its attack on Ukraine.
(Reuters)
Wednesday, August 31, 2022Gazprom halts pipeline gas flow in new jitters for Europe
Russian energy giant Gazprom has cut off its gas supplies to Germany via the Nord Stream 1 pipeline for maintenance work, further raising tensions on an already taut electricity market.
The three-day works at a compressor station are "necessary", Gazprom has said, adding that they had to be carried out after "every 1,000 hours of operation".
But Germany's Federal Network Agency chief Klaus Mueller has called it a "technically incomprehensible" decision, warning that it was likely just a pretext by Moscow to wield energy supplies as a threat.
Experience shows that Moscow "makes a political decision after every so-called maintenance", he said, adding that "we'll only know at the beginning of September if Russia does that again".
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Source: TRTWorld and agencies
Laptops and keyboards without a Russian-language layout are increasingly reaching Russia under a government scheme that maintains imports despite Western sanctions and an exodus of international businesses over the war in Ukraine, the Kommersant business daily reported Monday.
Russia’s “parallel import” scheme allows the supply of keyboards and laptops originally intended for foreign markets without approval from trademark owners.
The Industry and Trade Ministry said a Russian layout can be engraved on keyboards within the country without affecting the overall price of the product.
Demand has doubled for laser engraving services to change keyboard layouts into Cyrillic script, with keyboards and laptops coming mostly from Turkey and the United Arab Emirates this year, experts told Kommersant.
But the practice involves unpacking the devices, which customers would then be less likely to buy, and sometimes completely removing the keyboard, which could cancel warranties, according to Kommersant.
Russia has imported 2 million keyboards at a value of 4 billion rubles ($69 million) and 1.4 million laptops at a value of 90 billion rubles ($1.5 billion) in January-June 2022, according to the retailer M.Video-Eldorado.
Experts forecast keyboards without a Russian language layout to reach 10% by the end of 2022.
Government tenders have also been affected by Russia’s keyboard parallel import mechanism.
“There are problems with supplying automated workstations [with Russian keyboard layouts] to departments as part of contracts that had already been signed,” an unnamed government source was quoted as saying.
“The terms of the tenders prohibit contractors from delivering workstations without a keyboard or with an English keyboard layout,” they added.
