2007 Review: August

RIA Novosti Service looks back at the main events of the outgoing year; below the month-by-month review of 2007 continues, with August

August 1

* Russia's state-controlled natural gas giant Gazprom announces it would reduce natural gas deliveries to Belarus 45% from August 3 over the country's unpaid debt

August 2

* Two Russian mini-submarines surface after a more than eight-hour dive to the North Pole seabed, in a symbolic Russian expedition to claim Arctic territory

August 3

* Gazprom confirms Belarus had made a $190 million installment toward its $460 million debt, and delayed a reduction in supplies to the country by one week

August 6

* Russia signs a deal with Afghanistan to write off around 90% of its Soviet-era debt totaling $11.1 billion, with the remainder to be repaid over 23 years

August 8

* Gazprom announces that Belarus repaid all of its natural gas debt to Russia

August 9

* The United States condemns an alleged rocket attack on Georgia and urged Moscow and Tbilisi to ensure a peaceful resolution in the Georgian breakaway region of South Ossetia

August 14

* An explosion near Veliky Novgorod in northwest Russia derails an express train en route from Moscow to St. Petersburg and injures at least 60 people

August 17

* President Vladimir Putin says Russia permanently resumed long-distance patrol flights of strategic bombers, which were suspended in 1992 after the collapse of the Soviet Union

August 18

* Kazakhstan votes in an early parliamentary election in the country's first poll to introduce proportional representation

August 21

* MAKS-2007, an aviation exhibition held every two years, opens in the town of Zhukovsky, near Moscow

August 28

* The Russian Prosecutor General's Office charges four of 10 suspects currently in custody accused of last year's murder of journalist Anna Politkovskaya

August 30

* Taliban insurgents release the Korean Christian volunteers held hostage since July 19 in central Afghanistan