(President Lukashenko wanted to permanently bind Belarus to stronger Russian economy)
The Russian agreement for a reduction of Belarusian debt and the price of gas exported to Belarus was very positively received by President Lukashenko, who during his visit to Moscow expressed his admiration for President Fyodorov and the unbreakable friendship between Belarus and Russia. Furthermore, the Treaty on Union between Belarus and Russia was signed, which served as a basis for the establishment of a confederation between Russia and Belarus. Nevertheless, the nature of the political entity remained vague. The government undertook the following initiatives to develop the tourist industry in Russia:
- expansion of necessary infrastructure;
- promotion of tourism in Russia and abroad;
- state banks to provide cheap loans to develop the tourist industry;
- marketing campaign to attract tourists from the West and Asia;
- promotion of Russian indigenous cultures;
- establishment of the Tourist Federal Agency;
- cooperation with foreign investors;
- promotion of the Golden Ring of Russia;
- development of tourist routes in Russia.
(Modernized Vladivostok International Airport)
The pivot towards Asia opened a whole new range of possibilities for the Russian Far East and the city of Vladivostok. In order to turn the region into a commercial and industrial powerhouse, the following steps were taken:
- establishment of a special economic zone in Vladivostok;
- transformation of the region into a hub for industrial production (including production and export of cars);
- renovation and expansion of Vladivostok International Airport;
- expansion and modernization of the infrastructure;
- expansion of border crossings with China;
- cooperation with investors from China, South Korea, Japan, the United States and Australia;
- expansion of road and railway connections with the rest of Russia;
- development of oil and gas fields in Sakhalin;
- establishment of a federal agency in charge of the Russian Far East.
Soyuz TM-21 was a crewed Soyuz spaceflight to Mir. The mission launched from Baikonur Cosmodrome, atop a Soyuz-U2 carrier rocket, at 06:11:34 UTC on March 14, 1995. The flight marked the first time thirteen humans were flying in space simultaneously, with three aboard the Soyuz, three aboard Mir and seven aboard Space Shuttle Endeavour, flying STS-67. The spacecraft carried expedition EO-18 to the space station. This included the first American astronaut to launch on a Soyuz spacecraft and board Mir, Norman Thagard, for the American Thagard Increment aboard the station, which was the first Increment of the Shuttle-Mir program. The three crew members it launched were relieved by Space Shuttle Atlantis during STS-71, when they were replaced by expedition EO-19. The crew returned to earth aboard Soyuz TM-21 on September 11, 1995.
(Tokyo subway Sarin attack of 1995)
Tokyo subway attack of 1995, coordinated multiple-point terrorist attack in Tokyo on March 20, 1995, in which the odourless, colourless, and highly toxic nerve gas sarin was released in the city’s subway system. The attack resulted in the deaths of 12 (later increased to 13) people, and some 5,500 others were injured to varying degrees. Members of the Japan-based new religious movement AUM Shinrikyo (since 2000 called Aleph) were soon identified as the perpetrators of the attack. Prior to the March 20 incident, members of AUM had been involved in several deadly crimes that went unsolved by Japanese authorities until they began investigating the subway gas attack. In the first of these, in November 1989, a lawyer and his family were murdered in Yokohama. The lawyer had represented families attempting to recover their children from the cult. In June 1994 sarin was used in an attack in Matsumoto in Nagano prefecture, about 110 miles (175 km) northwest of central Tokyo. There the agent was released from a truck parked near a building complex, killing seven (an eighth victim died in 2008) and injuring some 500 others. It was later revealed that the gassing had been staged in an attempt to kill three judges who were presiding over a court case there that had been brought against AUM; the judges survived, although all were injured in the attack. In addition, AUM was linked to a failed attempt on March 15, 1995, to release a toxin in a Tokyo train station.
On the morning of March 20, five men entered the Tokyo subway system, each with bags of sarin. Each boarded a separate subway line, their trains all headed toward the Tsukiji Station in central Tokyo. At virtually the same time, each attacker dropped his bags of sarin on the floor of the train and punctured them before exiting the train and station and leaving the scene in a waiting getaway car. As the liquid in the bags started to vaporize, the fumes began affecting the passengers. The trains continued on toward the centre of the city, with sickened passengers leaving the cars at each station. The fumes were spread at each stop, either by emanating from the tainted cars themselves or through contact with liquid contaminating peoples’ clothing and shoes. Many of the individuals who were overcome by exposure to sarin during the attack were those who came into contact with the agent while trying to assist those who already had been stricken. Among the victims were two subway employees who died attempting to dispose of punctured sarin bags at the Kasumigaseki Station.
As authorities began their investigation into the attack, they quickly began making connections between this gassing and the earlier incidents, and suspicion quickly focused on AUM Shinrikyo. Two days after the incident, police mounted a massive raid on the AUM offices in Tokyo and its laboratory headquarters at Kamikuishiki in Yamanashi prefecture, in the process seizing numerous canisters of toxic chemicals used to manufacture sarin. In May AUM leader Asahara Shoko (Matsumoto Chizuo) and more than a dozen other cult leaders were arrested in nationwide raids. Although Asahara denied that his sect had been involved in the gas attacks, several of his followers later admitted that AUM members had participated in the Tokyo and Matsumoto incidents and implicated the sect in the 1989 killing of the lawyer and his family. It was also revealed that AUM had attempted the failed attack of March 15 and was involved in a string of murders of members or those thought to be enemies of the cult. Eventually, about 200 members of the leadership and rank and file were arrested, and scores were convicted of the gassings and other violent acts. The trials of AUM members continued into the early 21st century, with 13 people receiving death sentences. In 2004, after an eight-year trial, Asahara was convicted of a series of crimes (including having masterminded the subway attack) and was one of those sentenced to death. His appeal of the conviction and sentence was denied in 2006. Asahara and six other senior members of AUM were executed on July 6, 2018.
Three AUM members wanted in connection with the cult’s crimes remained fugitives for more than a decade and a half. The first, Hirata Makoto, surrendered to Tokyo police at the end of 2011. Kikuchi Naoko, the second of the three, was arrested in early June 2012 in Sagamihara, Kanagawa prefecture. Less than two weeks later the third fugitive, Takahashi Katsuya, was apprehended in Tokyo. Takahashi was the most-wanted of the trio, as he had been Asahara’s bodyguard and was suspected of having driven one of the getaway cars in the subway attack; he received a life sentence for his role in the crime.
(Attempted murder of Boris Berezovsky in 1995)
On 22 April 1995,
Boris Berezovsky, the richest man and the most powerful oligarch in Russia as the target of a car bombing incident, but survived the assassination attempt, in which his driver was killed and he himself was injured. Berezovsky was a close political and business ally of President Fyodorov and main donor to the United Labor Party of Russia. Berezovsky was the only son of a nurse and a builder. He studied electronics and computer science, completed his postgraduate studies in 1975, and earned his doctorate in decision-making theory in 1983. Thereafter he worked on information management at an institute of the Academy of Sciences of the U.S.S.R. In 1991 he became a corresponding member of the Russian Academy of Sciences.
Berezovsky founded his business empire in the last years of the Soviet Union. The economic liberalization launched by Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev legalized small-scale private enterprise and made it possible for Soviet businessmen to privatize the profitable parts of their state-owned businesses. They could also exploit the gap between the controlled prices set by the state and the prices Soviet-produced goods could fetch on the free market. Berezovsky typified these “new Russians.” He had worked as a consultant on information management to AvtoVaz, Inc., the largest Soviet car producer, and in 1989 he used those contacts to set up LogoVaz, the U.S.S.R.’s first capitalist car dealership. LogoVaz bought cars at the state-set price for cars intended for export and sold them at the much higher price such cars could fetch inside Russia. The profits enabled Berezovsky to expand his interests into oil and banking. An investigation conducted by the FSB indicated that members of a coalition of anti-government oligarchs might be behind the attack against Berezovsky. This led to a political conflict between the pro-government oligarchs and their political allies, who started to pressure President Fyodorov to destroy the coalition of anti-government oligarchs, who were allied with Boris Yeltsin, and Prime Minister Yavlinsky who was completely against it.
(Aftermath of the Neftegorsk earthquake)
The 1995 Neftegorsk earthquake occurred on 28 May at 1:04 local time on northern Sakhalin Island in the Russian Far East. It was the most destructive earthquake known within the current territory of Russia, with a magnitude of Ms7.1 and maximum Mercalli intensity of IX (Violent) that devastated the oil town of Neftegorsk, where 1,989 of its 3,977 citizens were killed, and another 750 injured. 90% of the victims were killed by the collapse of 17 five-story residential buildings. While Western media generally attributed the collapses to allegedly poor construction and shoddy materials of Soviet-era construction, a geotechnical study faulted a failure to accommodate the possibility of soil liquefaction in an area that was considered "practically aseismic". The Belgian Centre for Research on the Epidemiology of Disasters' EM-DAT database places the total damage at $64.1 million, while the United States' National Geophysical Data Center assesses the damage at $300 million.
This quake was not only catastrophic, it was totally unexpected: earthquakes with magnitudes greater than 6 were not known to occur in the area of northern Sakhalin Island. It is also of great scientific interest (some 20 papers have been published) because it occurred near a poorly known tectonic plate boundary where the Okhotsk Plate (connected with North American Plate) is crashing into the Amurian Plate (part of the Eurasian Plate), and indicates that the plate boundary is associated with a north–south striking seismic belt that runs the length of Sakhalin. More precisely, this earthquake occurred on the Upper Piltoun fault (also known as the Gyrgylan'i—Ossoy fault), which branches off the main Sakhalin-Hokkaido fault that runs along the east side of the island. 35 km (22 mi) of surface rupturing was observed (46 km including a branching fault), with an estimated average lateral displacement of about 4 meters, but up to 8 m (9 yd) in some places. (This compares to 14 km of slip estimated to have accumulated on the Sakhalin-Hokkaido fault in the last 4 million years.) The unusual strength of this quake and length of rupturing, and the low level of seismic activity beforehand, has been attributed to the accumulation of strain over a long period of time on a locked fault segment.
(Cooperation between President Fyodov and Prime Minister Yavlinsky was becoming more and more difficult)
In the meantime, a political conflict between President Fyodorov and Prime Minister Yavlisnky took place over the nomination of
the new CEO of Gazprom – the largest company in Russia. President Yavlisnky wanted to nominate
Vladimir Yakovlev, a former deputy mayor of Saint Petersburg. His candidacy was supported by Anatoly Sobchak and a number of pro-government oligarchs. On the other hand, Prime Minister Yavlinsky supported his close ally,
Yury Boldyrev. On the one hand, Yavlinsky argued that choosing Yakovlev as the new CEO of Gazprom would make only oligarchs more powerful and dangerous to the Russian democracy, while his opponents argued that Yavlinsky wanted to put his puppet in charge of Gazprom because of his own lust for power and control.
