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Russian: Northern Europe
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Russian is a Slavic language in the Indo-European family. From the point of view of the spoken language, its closest relatives are Ukrainian and Belarusian, the other two national languages in the East Slavic. In many places in eastern Ukraine and Belarus, these languages are spoken interchangeably, and in certain areas traditional bilingualism resulted in language mixture, e.g. Surzhyk in eastern Ukraine and Trasianka in Belarus. An East Slavic Old Novgorod dialect, although vanished during the fifteenth or sixteenth century, is sometimes considered to have played a significant role in formation of the modern Russian language.
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TNK clearly manipulated Russia's bankruptcy laws in a predatory fashion, and used its strong ties to the Tyumen regional administration to prevent the company's foreign owners from using Russian courts to protect their interests. But because it is not clear that any laws were broken, BP-Amoco and other foreign investors in Sidanko--including the London-based European Bank for Reconstruction and Development--may ... deserve some of the blame for their predicament. Nonetheless, the details of the dispute may be less important than the fact that Washington decided to make the TNK affair into a test case of Moscow's professed willingness to improve the climate for foreign investors.
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Until recently, Russian-EU oil-transit routes included a pipeline connecting the Russian city of Polotsk and Latvia's ice-free port of Ventspils, which had a major oil terminal on the Baltic Sea. However, following the construction of a new oil terminal in the Russian town of Primorsk, Russia's oil supplies to Europe through Ventspils have all but stopped.
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Russiatoday.com was launched in 1996 in advance of the Russian election campaign held in April of that year. It has been operating continuously ever since, and has become a widely used Internet source for breaking news about Russia. Russiatoday.com is owned and operated by European Internet Network (EIN), a publication of the Internet Product Development Group, Inc., a Maryland USA corporation.
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