The EU-Russia summit took place in the “city of sinners”

So it came together: on the day of the 45th birthday of Mikhail Khodorkovsky, the Russia-EU summit opened in Khanty-Mansiysk. This time no one remembered the disgraced oligarch in the city, which until recently was the main pearl of his financial empire. The New Times tried to understand: why Khanty-Mansiysk?

The EU leaders ended up in Khanty-Mansiysk at the behest of Vladimir Putin. A year ago, speaking at a similar summit in Portugal, then President Putin proposed that the next meeting be held here. In many respects, it was impromptu: as they say, only a day before the start of the forum, already flying to Lisbon, Putin called the governor of the Khanty-Mansi Autonomous Okrug Alexander Filippenko with a question whether the city was ready for such an event. Putin himself never visited Khanty-Mansiysk in all the years of his presidency.

City of the future

Maybe Putin wanted to show that life in Russia exists not only in Moscow and St. Petersburg. Maybe he just had a desire to clearly demonstrate what petrodollars can do even with the neglected Russian outback. Maybe the motives were completely different, which can only be guessed at. In any case, it is unlikely that anyone will turn their tongues to call Khanty-Mansiysk a standard Russian city. Back in the early 2000s, the entire region was entirely dependent on the financial empire of Mikhail Khodorkovsky. Yukos' interests extended not only to Khanty-Mansiysk, but also to neighboring Achinsk, Nefteyugansk, and Otradnoye. Yuganskneftegaz, one of Khodorkovsky's most profitable assets, was based in Khanty-Mansiysk. Visiting foreigners compare Khanty-Mansiysk with small Swedish or North German cities. A clean, beautiful city, where all the buildings seem to date from not even the 20th century. Ideal roads, new clinics, overhauled and re-lined Khrushchev houses, which don’t even look like Khrushchev houses at all. The huge building of the House of Journalists in the very center of the city - opposite it is now the headquarters of the regional branch of United Russia. The streets are hung with social advertising: "Ugra - the territory of the future", "City of bold ideas", "City of new medicine", "City of dreams".

Before Yukos, however, Khanty-Mansiysk was nothing like the city of dreams. It was only with the arrival of efficient oil workers that the city of 60,000 began to turn into what the guests at the summit were so surprised at: EU High Commissioner for Foreign Policy and Security Javier Solana, European Commission President Jose Manuel Barroso and new President Dmitry Medvedev. Under Yukos, an airport was built in the city, which soon received international status, a bridge across the Irtysh, a new river port, the Gostiny Dvor pyramidal shopping center and the main city church - the Ascension of Christ.

Will God forgive sinners?

Together with the huge pyramid of Gostiny Dvor, the Church of the Ascension of Christ is considered the main city attraction. It is visible from all over Khanty-Mansiysk, as it is built on a high hill. At the foot of the hill is the Yukos office of Yuganskneftegaz. True, now the name of the company itself is the name of a new owner - Rosneft, which bought Khodorkovsky's main asset through the well-known office Baikalfinancegroup. From the office of the oil workers to the temple, one has to climb a high staircase, which is cut in half by a multi-level fountain. At each new level, stone scrolls are installed in the center of the reservoir, on which the commandments are written. The very first one is “Do not envy”, the very last, at the very top is “Do not bear false witness”: it is almost impossible to see it.

The Russia-EU summit was held in a new building, officially called the Concert and Theater Center Yugra-Classic. A nun in a church shop said that when the construction of this building began, church ministers and parishioners turned to the authorities, offering to move the construction site. “In the place where the center now stands, in the 1930s-1950s there was a place of mass executions,” says the nun. “The church offered to erect a large cross in this place in memory of the repressed, but they did not listen to us. Now they have fun there. God will forgive them, sinners."

Vanity Fair

The “sinners”, having barely arrived in Khanty-Mansiysk, went to a closed lunch, on the occasion of which not a single restaurant in the city center was open, and with this the program of the first day of the summit was completed. The very next day, Dmitry Medvedev looked at something like an exhibition of the achievements of the national economy on the central square. People in national clothes and specially installed tents traded amulets, amulets and fur toys.

In order to ensure security, about the same number of policemen were herded into the city during the days of the summit as there are residents in Khanty-Mansiysk, and then, so that the policemen were not very conspicuous, they began to hide them. For some reason, the whole bus was sent to the forest, and the law enforcement officers who were on duty along the roads hid in the literal sense of the word in the gardens, so that distinguished guests passing by could only see caps sticking out from behind the gates of private properties.

Politicians, however, were not up to the police. Slovenian Prime Minister Janez Jansa, representative of this year's EU presidency, Solana, Barroso and Medvedev announced the start of negotiations on a new Russia-EU agreement to replace the existing one (it entered into force on December 1, 1997). When the new agreement will be signed is not yet known: the first round of negotiations will take place in Brussels on July 4.

Dmitry Medvedev said at a press conference that the choice of Khanty-Mansiysk as the venue for the summit was not accidental and was connected with growing energy problems. “Although, when inviting you to this city last October, we did not suspect that this issue would reach such a point of intensity in eight months,” Medvedev said. “It is here that those energy rivers are formed, which then flow to Europe,” the president explained to the European guests. If the Europeans knew: these rivers flow from the city of sinners.