Many employees have already been forced to take up second jobs, like Leonid Emchanov, 31, a mechanic now moonlighting as a security guard to feed his family.
"I am the only one in the family who works. I have two children, my wife ... is on maternity leave. I have to work two jobs, but even this is not enough," he said.
If Avtovaz is unable to survive this crisis, its demise would mark the end of an industrial era for Russia, and for its many Lada enthusiasts.
In an underground garage in Tolyatti, two men in vintage overalls were busy at work on a 1980s Lada Niva, a legendary four-wheel drive vehicle, that was shining with a fresh coat of red paint.
"Since childhood, my whole life has been linked to the factory," said one of the mechanics, Sergei Diogrik.
"All our relatives in Tolyatti worked at the factory and I myself worked there. I had no choice, everything is related to the company," he added.
The 43-year-old founded and runs the Lada History Club, bringing together fans of the Soviet car from all over the world.
"It was a powerful producer. The record in the early 1980s was 720,000 cars per year," he said, compared to nearly 300,000 cars produced in 2021.
"It was fashionable to come here. Now the fashion is for young people to go to Moscow or somewhere else," Diogrik added.
He said that he is trying to remain hopeful, pointing out that the factory and its workers already survived the economic hardships of the 1990s.
"A Russian person who survived the 90s, especially in Tolyatti, will cope now. Everything will be fine," he said.
HONG KONG, April 4 (Reuters) - Hong Kong's embattled leader Carrie Lam, who has governed the global financial hub through the unprecedented upheaval of anti-government protests and COVID-19, said on Monday she will not seek a second five-year term of office.
Lam's announcement came as media said Chief Secretary John Lee, Hong Kong's second most senior official, was set to resign to join the race to replace Lam in May as the Chinese-ruled city's next leader.
"There’s only one consideration and that is family. I have told everyone before that family is my first priority," Lam told a regular press briefing.
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"They think it’s time for me to go home."
She declined to comment on possible candidates to replace her and said she had not decided on her future plans.
Lam, born in British-ruled Hong Kong in 1957 and a life-long civil servant who describes herself as a devout Catholic, took office in 2017 with a pledge to unite a city that was growing increasingly resentful of Beijing's tightening grip.
Two years later, millions of democracy supporters took to the streets in sometimes violent anti-government protests. The unrest led to Beijing imposing a sweeping national security law in June 2020, giving it more power than ever to shape life in Hong Kong.
An exasperated Lam said at the height of the unrest in 2019 that if she had the choice she would quit, adding in remarks to a group of business people that the chief executive "has to serve two masters by constitution, that is the central people's government and the people of Hong Kong".
"Political room for manoeuvring is very, very, very limited," she added, according to an audio recording of her comments obtained by Reuters.
Hong Kong Chief Executive Carrie Lam speaks during a news conference after the Legislative Council election in Hong Kong, China, December 20, 2021. REUTERS/Tyrone Siu/File Photo
Lam said on Monday she had proposed a government restructuring to mainland authorities that would include new policy departments but it would be up to the city's next leader to decide whether to go ahead with the plan.
City leaders are selected by a small election committee stacked with Beijing loyalists so whoever becomes the next leader of the former British colony will do so with Beijing's tacit approval.
Lee, 64, a security official during the prolonged and often violent 2019 pro-democracy protests, was promoted in 2021 in a move some analysts said signalled Beijing's renewed focus on security rather than the economy.
Lee did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
Other possible contenders mentioned in media include the city's financial secretary, Paul Chan, as well as former leader Leung Chun-ying. None has yet to announce a bid.
Hong Kong returned from British to Chinese rule in 1997 with the guarantee of wide-ranging freedoms, including an independent judiciary and right to public assembly, for at least 50 years.
The United States sanctioned both Lam and Lee, among other officials, in 2020, saying they had undermined Hong Kong's high degree of autonomy from Beijing and curtailed political freedoms with the national security law that punishes offences like subversion and secession with up to life imprisonment.
Chinese and Hong Kong authorities deny individual rights are being eroded and say the security law was needed to restore the stability necessary for economic success after the prolonged unrest.
The leadership election was pushed back from March to May 8 to give the government time to battle a COVID outbreak that has infected more than a million of the 7.4 million people in the city. Lam's term ends on June 30.
Since Hong Kong returned to Chinese rule it has had four chief executives, who all struggled to balance the democratic and liberal aspirations of many residents with the vision of China's Communist Party leadership.
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Reporting by Jessie Pang, James Pomfret, Twinnie Siu; Writing by Anne Marie Roantree; Editing by Robert Birsel
BERLIN: Wladimir Klitschko, a Ukrainian former boxing champion whose brother is the mayor of Kyiv, heaped praise on Germany for its help after meeting officials in Berlin in an effort to drum up more support for his country.
Klitschko and his brother Vitali, also a former boxing star, have strong ties to Germany, having spent most of their professional careers there. But they have previously accused Berlin of failing to do enough to help Ukraine in the face of the Russian invasion.
In a video shot outside the Bundestag and posted on his Twitter feed, Wladimir Klitschko said he had been able to see for himself during his two-day visit that the two nations were "truly brothers and sisters figuratively now" and he would never forget Germany's support.
The German government has made several policy U-turns in the last six weeks, agreeing to send Ukraine weapons, suspending a gas pipeline project with Russia that bypassed the former Soviet state, and vowing to boost defence spending.
During the visit by Wladimir Klitschko, who enlisted in the Ukrainian reserve army shortly before war broke out, German media showed pictures of him meeting with Chancellor Olaf Scholz and the foreign, finance and economy ministers.
"Klitschko and his delegation brought the Ukrainian fighting spirit that reaches us in countless images every day into the foreign ministry," Foreign Minister Annalena Baerbock wrote on Instagram. "For the government and me it is clear: we will continue to support Ukraine with all our force."
Klitschko's praise contrasted with ongoing criticism of Germany from the Ukrainian ambassador to Berlin Andrij Melnyk, who on Saturday criticised it for resisting a European embargo on Russian energy imports.
"When will the cruel actions against Ukrainian civilians be bad enough for Germany to finally turn off war criminal (Russian President Vladimir) Putin's money tap and impose an embargo for oil, gas, coal and metal? How long will you still hesitate?" he said in a tweet he addressed to the federal government.
Moscow has denied targeting civilians in what it calls a "special military operation" to demilitarise and "denazify" its neighbour.
ABOARD THE PAPAL PLANE: Pope Francis said on Saturday (Apr 2) that he was considering a trip to the Ukrainian capital, Kyiv.
Asked by a reporter on the plane taking him from Rome to Malta if he was considering an invitation made by Ukrainian political and religious authorities, Francis answered: "Yes, it is on the table". He gave no further details.
Francis has been invited by Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskiy, Kyiv Mayor Vitaliy Klitschko, Major Archbishop Sviatoslav Shevchuk of Ukraine's Byzantine-rite Catholic Church and Ukraine's ambassador to the Vatican, Andriy Yurash.
He has spoken on the phone with Zelenskiy and Shevchuk.
Since the invasion, which Russia calls a "special military operation" to demilitarise Ukraine, the pope has strongly condemned what he has called an "unjustified aggression" and denounced "atrocities."
But he has only referred to Russia directly in prayers, such as during a special global event for peace on Mar 25.
WASHINGTON: President Joe Biden said on Friday (Apr 1) that more than 30 countries have joined the United States in tapping national oil reserves to try and settle global energy markets spooked by fallout from Russia's invasion of Ukraine.
"This morning, over 30 countries from across the world convened in an extraordinary meeting and agreed to the release of tens of millions of additional barrels of oil onto the market," Biden said in an address from the White House.
The member countries of the International Energy Agency, however, did not agree on volumes or timing for the release at their emergency meeting, said Hidechika Koizumi, director of the international affairs division at Japan's Ministry of Economy, Trade and Industry.
"In light of the current situation ... the participants in the IEA meeting agreed on the additional release itself, but they could not agree on the total volume and the allocation of each country," Koizumi told reporters.
"The details will be discussed between the IEA secretariat and the member countries," he said, adding that details could be agreed "within the next week or so".
The 31-member IEA representing industrialised nations but not Russia last presided over the largest coordinated oil release in its history on Mar 1 of nearly 62 million barrels, about half of which was contributed by the United States.
:The world's first "human challenge" trial in which volunteers were deliberately exposed to the coronavirus has found that symptoms had no effect on how likely an infected person is to pass the disease on to others.
The findings underscore the difficulty in preventing community infections as the Word Health Organization (WHO) warns of a rise in cases.
The research project, run by Open Orphan with Imperial College, London, showed that among the 18 participants that caught COVID-19, the severity of symptoms, or whether they developed symptoms at all, had nothing to do with the viral load in their airways.
The viral load, or tendency to shed the virus, was measured by two methods known as focus-forming assay (FFA) and quantitative polymerase chain reaction (qPCR).
"There was no correlation between the amount of viral shedding by qPCR or FFA and symptom score," the researchers said in paper published by scientific journal Nature Medicine.
The Imperial trial exposed 36 healthy young adults without a history of infection or vaccination to the original SARS-CoV-2 strain of the virus and monitored them in a quarantined setting.
Since two volunteers were found to have had antibodies against the virus after all, they were excluded from the analysis. Slightly more than half of them contracted the virus.
No serious adverse events occurred, and the human challenge study model was shown to be safe and well tolerated in healthy young adults, the research team had said earlier this year.
(Reporting by Ludwig Burger;Editing by Robert Birsel)
The liquefied natural gas (LNG) tanker Sohshu Maru approaches Jera Co.'s Futtsu Thermal Power Station, unseen, in Futtsu, Chiba Prefecture, Japan, on Friday, Dec. 17, 2021. Japanese Prime Minister Fumio Kishida's announcement on Thursday that he would not abandon a massive Russian gas project was decided weeks ago, sources told Reuters.
Kiyoshi Ota | Bloomberg | Getty Images
Japanese Prime Minister Fumio Kishida's announcement on Thursday that he would not abandon a massive Russian gas project was decided weeks ago when he told top officials in private he wouldn't risk Japan's energy security, three sources said.
Kishida assured his trade and economy minister, Koichi Hagiuda, and other officials during meetings in early March that he would stay in the Sakhalin-2 liquefied natural gas (LNG) project because leaving threatened the economy, the sources said.
The sources with knowledge of those meetings declined to be identified because they are not allowed to speak on the record.
Kishida on Thursday told parliament "it is not our policy to withdraw" from Sakhalin-2, the clearest public comments yet on the offshore project.
The details of the March meetings and the subtle shift in public messaging by both Kishida and other government officials in the weeks that followed help illustrate the difficult balance the Japan has had navigating its response to Russia's Ukraine invasion with other Group of Seven nations.
Even as it targets Russian banks and oligarchs with sanctions, Japan has less leeway than some of its allies to cut ties to Russian gas, on which it has become more reliant since shutting down nuclear reactors after the 2011 Fukushima disaster.
Faced with national elections in July, Kishida wants to avoid soaring fuel bills and the risk of blackouts. In the immediate aftermath of the invasion — which Russia calls a "special operation" — Japan initially emphasised the need to move in tandem with the G-7, while maintaining a stable supply of energy.
But in the weeks that followed, policymakers increasingly talked about how Japan's stakes in LNG projects could be at risk of seizure and the importance of energy security.
Kishida's announcement may also represent a victory for the trade ministry's energy policy over foreign ministry diplomacy, and could soothe investors in Japanese trading houses that own stakes in Sakhalin-2 and other projects in Russia.
LNG dependence
For more than a decade, energy-poor Japan has tapped Russian gas to cut its Middle East oil reliance and to make up for lost nuclear capacity.
Although it accounts for a small portion of Japan's LNG, the Russian gas costs a fraction of spot market rates and, along with gas from Australia and Southeast Asia, has boosted the amount of energy consumption under Japan's control to more than a third from less than a quarter a decade ago.
If Japan were forced to replace Russian LNG with gas bought on the spot market, that would mean an additional cost of up to 3 trillion yen ($25 billion), at the current spot price, a senior energy agency official, who asked not to be identified, said.
Japanese gas and electricity companies use Russian LNG. Hiroshima Gas, from Kishida's hometown, relies on it for half its supply. Overall, LNG accounts for a quarter of Japan's total energy mix and generates 36% of the country's electricity.
"Even if supply can be secured, the cost of gas will rise tremendously," said Ken Koyama, senior managing director at the Institute of Energy Economics.
National security fears
For some government officials, the big fear is Japan would lose the right to tap gas from Sakhalin, undermining national security by threatening energy independence.
Oil remains Japan's biggest energy source at around two fifths of consumption, and nearly all is transported from the Middle East along sea lanes that pass through waters patrolled by the Chinese navy.
If Tokyo were to ban Russian gas, Beijing could also step in to buy it, one of the sources said. China has called for an immediate ceasefire in Ukraine but has refused to explicitly condemn the invasion.
Energy independence had long been a concern for Japan, and "could eventually cause tension with Europe and the United States," the energy agency official said.
Still, Kishida may have to reconsider if France pulls out of the Arctic LNG 2 gas development project in Siberia, which is 10% owned by French oil major TotalEnergies, another one of the sources said.
The United States, a close ally, has so far praised Tokyo's sanctions, including a recent ban on Russian gold and a pledge to stop potential sanctions-busting using digital assets, as "unprecedented."
So far, the G-7 has only agreed to reduce dependence on Russian energy rather than impose an immediate halt to energy purchases. Germany in particular is wary of banning Russian supplies that account for about a third of its gas.
But as outrage grows over Ukraine, other G-7 countries could push Kishida to halt Russian gas.
"If the rest of the G-7 decide to ban Russian energy imports then Japan must do so too. If the G-7 decides not to, then Japan can avoid doing anything," said Takayuki Homma, chief economist at Sumitomo Corp Global Research.
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