Non-white foreigners have been the victims of a number of attacks in recent months across the country, but particularly in St. Petersburg - the location for this year's annual summit of the group of eight leading industrialized nations on July 15-17.
"Russia's record on racism is incompatible with the country's place on the international stage and undermines its standing in the world," a press release quoted Amnesty's secretary general, Irene Khan, as saying. "It is time for the Russian authorities to address the country's deteriorating human rights record and live up to their international obligations if they seek to be international players."
The human-rights group cited figures from Moscow's Sova analytical agency that said 28 people were murdered and 366 attacked on racially motivated grounds in 2005. But it said the actual figure "could be much higher as many racially motivated crimes are either not reported at all or not registered as such," as many are filed under charges of "hooliganism."
Amnesty said local and national authorities were not doing enough to deal with the problem.
"Some regional authorities have taken initiatives to address racism, but they are woefully inadequate and isolated," the press release quoted Khan as saying. "The time has come for the federal government to put into action a comprehensive national plan to give the fight against racism the high priority it deserves."
Assailants are often members of "well-organized groups professing a racist, neo-fascist and violent ideology," and there may be as many as 50,000 members of such groups across the country, Amnesty said, citing NGO figures. Official statistics say there are 150 such groups in the country, with 5,000 members.
The group also cited discrimination - usually explained as "counter-terrorism measures" - against people from the troubled North Caucasus, who are 21 times more likely to be stopped in random document checks on the Moscow metro, according to a study.
Over a thousand protestors took to the streets of St. Petersburg - President Vladimir Putin's hometown - on April 11 in the wake of the slaying of Lamzer Samba, a fifth-year student at the city's State Telecommunications University. Samba, from Senegal, was killed on his way home from a nightclub in the south of the city center with a group of fellow African students April 7. Police found a gun with a swastika at the scene.
A nine-year-old girl of mixed Russian and African origin was hospitalized after being stabbed near her apartment building in St. Petersburg March 25. The parents of another nine-year-old girl, Khursheda Sultonova, an ethnic Tajik who died in February 2004 after being attacked by a group of young men, have launched an appeal with a city court against a jury decision to clear a defendant of the killing of their daughter.
The jury convicted the main defendant in the trial of robbery and hooliganism, but cleared him of murder charges. Six others were found guilty of hooliganism, and another was cleared of all charges.
In March, a Moscow City Court found Alexander Koptsev guilty of a knife attack on nine people at a central Moscow synagogue in early January, and sentenced him to 13 years in prison.
Other violent attacks on non-white foreigners in St. Petersburg in recent months include an killing of a man from Mali, who was stabbed to death in February, and the murder of a student from Cameroon last December and of a Congolese student in September.
Routine attacks by skinheads and youth gangs on foreigners with non-Slavic features have also been reported in other Russian cities. The central city of Voronezh alone has seen at least seven apparently racially motivated killings over the past six years, including the murder of a Peruvian student in October last year.
