The news is almost all business this week.

As expected, British energy company BP sold its stake in a Siberian natural gas field to Russia's state-owned Gazprom. The reported $900 million price tag, which was labeled cheap by The Moscow Times, covers both the Kovykta gas field and the East Siberian Gas Company.

The agreement has been all but a certainty for some time since officials in Moscow--which had not been happy about how the initial permits had been issued--had repeatedly threatened to yank BP's license to operate. According to published reports, BP had sunk a minimum of $1 billion into Kovyta and experts have valued output from the field, which contains about 2.0 trillion cubic meters of gas, at about $20 billion. Moscow has been regaining state control over many energy assets of late: Shell lost its interest in one of the Sakhalin Island developments to Gazprom as well. As their consolation prize, BP and its Russian joint venture partner TNK-BP, will get the opportunity to help Gazprom develop its interests outside Russia.

Aeroflot also headed for the sidelines this past week. The carrier officially withdrew from bidding for Italian airline Alitalia, citing a lack of access to information about Alitalia's finances and concerns that its privatization would allow Aeroflot to operate the carrier as it wished (translation: make lots of layoffs, I'm guessing). Aeroflot had signaled its interest in Aeroflot back in April, much to my amusement.

Thomson Financial said this week that Russia was the world's third most active market for initial public offerings in the first half of the year. Russian IPOs totaled $15.83 billion, right behind the United States with $21.57 billion and China with $17.83, but ahead of Britain and Brazil. The largest single Russian IPO was that of the state-owned bank VTB, which raised $7.9 billion.

The hopes of thousands of cell phone-toting Russians were undoubtedly dashed this week when Moscow declined to eliminate the 5% duty on imported cell phone handsets. Cell phones are a $1.4 billion market in Russia according to Kommersant.

And finally, a cautionary story from the international environmental advocacy group Greenpeace. It released a report this week that fish caught in the Neva river contain high concentrations of poisonous pollutants, including arsenic and polychlorobiphenyl. In commenting on the report (which can be found here), The St. Petersburg Times noted that the city's own government has acknowledged that 40% of untreated sewage and industrial waste in St. Petersburg is dumped into the river. Greenpeace has launching a program to take water samples from the Neva and publicize the results.