New services designed to cut journey times and run more frequently than present services will be built between Moscow, Kazan, Samara and Ulyanovsk, Putin said.
"It will be a powerful incentive for the development of high speed rail services in the European part of Russia," he said.
Yulia Tsyplyayeva, chief economist at Moscow's office of BNP Paribas, said Friday that Russia badly needs structural reforms but the World Cup is unlikely to give an impetus to them.
The stadium, VTB Arena Park, is designed by Dutch architect Erick van Egeraat and his Russian partner Mikhail Posokhin. Their plans include building a park with public green space, shopping, restaurants, training facilities, and even a hotel. The big design move here is the redevelopment of the Dynamo Moscow Stadium, a football arena and erstwhile Olympics venue built in 1928. With the new setup, two stadia will be plunked down over the old one, so that the existing perimeter facade is neatly preserved.
Qatar, with 1.7 million people, only 300,000 of whom are citizens, is the smallest nation to host a World Cup. But with one of the world’s fastest-growing economies, it won with a bid that urged FIFA officials to make history as well as money. The success of the 2010 tournament, which was held in Africa for the first time, apparently further emboldened FIFA officials to continue to take its grandest spectacle to yet another part of the world, something that places soccer’s vision far ahead of the Olympics.
Russia and England are bidding to stage the 2018 World Cup along with joint bids from Spain/Portugal and Belgium/Netherlands while Japan, South Korea, Qatar, United States and Australia are candidates for 2022.
Proof of the positive results of the discussions of Sochi’s investment attractiveness was quite around the corner. Even though it’s more than three years to go before the start of the Winter Olympic Games-2014, the city and the nearby territory is dotted with construction sites. Contractors work day and night, and the frames of some of huge constructions to be commissioned already next year and in 2012 look quite impressive. The region has made an emphasis on Sochi’s charm as a Black Sea resort city as well as development of its infrastructure and transport.
“Sochi has always been an investor’s attraction and it remains such especially now that we are getting ready for the Winter Olympic Games. With the amount of attention our government pays to this project, I think investors can be sure of tomorrow,” said Sochi’s Mayor Anatoly Pakhomov.
Sponsorship revenues are already over $1.0 billion, making Sochi by far the most successful winter Games organising committee in that respect, and even look likely to surpass Beijing's $1.2 billion domestic sponsorship revenue mark for its much bigger 2008 summer Games.
"It is true we have exceeded our (sponsorship) plans but we have now established new plans," [Games chief Dmitiry] Chernyshenko told Reuters a day before the start of an International Olympic Committee (IOC) coordination commission visit to monitor progress.
The sports expert says that one can compare Russia’s situation with South Africa’s in the run-up to the world cup this year. Pretoria spent some three billion dollars to get ready, Ivanov says, but “Russia’s expenses, considering all [its] problems with corruption will be one and a half times greater.”
The idea of pursuing the world cup, the writer says, “according to rumors belongs to Vladimir Putin,” and that explains why “the tactics of the struggle of the Russian Football Union … repeat the pattern of the struggle for the Olympiad in Sochi: Everything is being build on the basis of the personal guarantees of the prime minister.”
Russia's bid proposes 14 new stadiums in 13 cities and a massive overhaul of the national infrastructure as part of its bid, making it the most ambitious and expensive competitor for the 2018 tournament.
Inspection team leader Harold Mayne-Nicholls said work would have to start immediately. "I would like to emphasise that, in the case the Fifa Executive Committee decides in December that the World Cup will go for the first time in football history to Russia, work would need to start immediately, to guarantee that everything will be in place right in time."
It means the construction of a new winter community in the North Caucasus mountains, the construction of 300 kilometres of roads, 100km of rail, 39 tunnels and 24 thermal and hydro power stations.
"We are well on track," asserts Mr Chernyshenko, a native of Sochi who was handed the games' baton five years ago.
"Our construction site is now probably competing in terms of size with London's," he says.
With four years still to go, that figure will dwarf overall spend for Canada's Vancouver Olympics of about £3.5bn.
The 2014 Games in Sochi, on Russia's southwestern coast, are already dogged by massive controversy and allegations of corruption.
Many homes are in the process of being demolished to make way for the six-stadia Olympic Park.
The Novaya Gazeta story focuses on Vladimir Leshchevsky, deputy of construction in the Kremlin's Office of Presidential Affairs – a vast empire that owns about $500 billion worth of former Soviet Communist Party property. It alleges that he took about $5.7 million in kickbacks from the Moskonversprom consortium of construction companies in connection with the renovation of two Kremlin-owned Sochi area sanitoriums.
"To really fight corruption he would have to fire [Prime Minister Vladimir] Putin, who is at the center of the Sochi Olympic scandal, but that's not going to happen," says Boris Nemtsov, a former deputy prime minister and a leader of the liberal opposition who ran unsuccessfully for mayor of Sochi in polls last year that some criticized as Kremlin-manipulated. "So he orders an investigation of Leshchevsky, a nobody. It's just a PR action."
Re-settlement of town residents whose houses are to be demolished and lands withdrawn during construction works will cost an extra 12 billion rubles (395.6 million dollars).
He added this was only a preliminary estimation at the moment, as "a great number" of problems remains in place, including customs and border control issues.
Corruption in Russia has made road-building so expensive that the same stretches of highway could be coated in an eight-inch thick layer of foie gras for the same price, a study has found.
The decision to publish the bizarre calculation in the Russian edition of Esquire magazine was designed to embarrass the Kremlin, which has failed to tackle endemic corruption in the industry. The magazine used one road, being built for the 2014 Winter Olympics in the southern town of Sochi, as an example. The price tag for the 50-kilo-metre long road is $7.8 billion Cdn, more than the entire costs of the Vancouver Olympics including the upgrades to the Sea to Sky Highway.
Read more: http://www.vancouversun.com/news/road+Sochi+costs+billion+corruption/3308038/story.html#ixzz0uQmjuj5a
Russian Railways is speeding up construction of the main infrastructure project for the 2014 Winter Olympics in Sochi – the combined road and rail route linking Adler and the Alpika-Service mountain resort.
In line with requirements set down by the International Olympic Committee, Russian Railways’ contractors are carrying out tunneling work at six tunnel complexes on the mountain route. To date, servicing-evacuation tunnels have been created at complex No. 1, complex No. 5, and rail tunnel No. 2. Work on the other tunnels is proceeding on schedule.
Q: What's new in Sochi?
Bodesteiner: When I went there two years ago, it was a really small little mountain town up a pretty narrow mountain valley. I swear there must have been about 800 people living there with old houses and without any kind of resort at all up there. Now, going back, you can see it's going to be a huge transformation. There's tons of construction going on right now everywhere you go with thousands of workers and trucks. They're building a world class ski resort which is going to have great skiing. The mountains are all being connected by peak to peak gondolas on two sides of the valley. Down along the river they're doing great development of about two dozen high-end hotels. That's going to basically be the heartbeat of the Olympics because along the river corridor are the mountain venues up at the top of the ski area, then the resort village and down at the bottom of the river valley in Sochi are the ice arenas. They're actually at the end of Sochi, about an hour from downtown in normal traffic. So really I think the action is going to be up in skiing and snowboarding venue at Rosa Khutor.
Russian Railways is building a rail line from Adler to Sochi Airport. The new intermodal line will ensure comfortable high-speed transport for guests and participants at the 2014 Winter Olympic Games. The estimated capacity of the line will be more than 86,000 people per day, or up to 60% of all air passengers travelling to the Olympics. The line is scheduled to be launched in 2012.
"Sufficient funds have been allocated by the government for the reconstruction of existing bases, pitches, and infrastructure," [Russian Football Union head Sergei Fursenko] said. "Around 340 million until 2015 is expected to be spent on these needs."
He added that 13 new stadiums would be built for the tournament, and that even if Russia was unsuccessful in its bid, "we will build six stadiums in any case."
The Mail on Sunday revelations came only two days after former England captain David Beckham had helped the FA submit a 1,752-page bid book as they try to persuade Fifa to award England the 2018 World Cup.
"I have decided to resign as chairman of the FA and the 2018 Bid board," Triesman said in a statement.
"A private conversation with someone whom I thought to be a friend was taped without my knowledge and passed to a national newspaper," he added, referring to former aide Melissa Jacobs, who met Triesman a fortnight ago.
"I was there recently and what they presented is remarkable," he told the London Evening Standard. "Russia is not a country but a continent and Russia has big plans to expand."