“We have every reason to say that in three or four years the test of the system may start, in five years the first batch will be put into service by the army,” the State Space Agency head said at a press conference in Kyiv on Friday.

According to him, the developer of the Sapsan missile system (the Dnipropetrovsk-based Pivdenne Design Bureau) has prepared the project of the new tactical missile system, the government funding of the program will start in 2012.

The financing of the program in 2012 approved by the Ukrainian government will be UAH 195 million, Alekseyev said.

Some 70 enterprises of Ukraine’s aerospace and defense industries will take part in the project to create the Sapsan multi-functional missile complex, and 99% of its components will be produced in Ukraine.

The Sapsan MFMC is among the key programs in the Ukrainian draft state armament program for a period until 2015.

The Sapsan should combine the features of tactical, tactical missile complexes and multiple rocket launchers.

The missile range stated by the developer (the Pivdenne Design Bureau in Dnipropetrovsk) is up to 280 kilometers.

Three topless Ukrainian protesters were detained Saturday while trying to break into an invitation-only gathering of international CEOs and political leaders to call attention to the needs of the world's poor.

After a complicated journey to reach the heavily guarded Swiss resort town of Davos, the women arrived at the entrance to the congress center where the World Economic Forum takes place every year.

With temperatures around freezing in the snow-filled town, they took off their tops and climbed a fence before being detained.

Davos police spokesman Thomas Hobi said the three women were taken to the police station and their papers were checked. They were told that they weren't allowed to demonstrate, and will be released later, he said.

The activists are from the group Femen, which has become popular in Ukraine for staging small, half-naked protests to highlight a range of issues including oppression of political opposition. They have also conducted protests in some other countries.

Protesters from the Occupy movement that started with protests against practices on Wall Street held a separate demonstration in Davos on Saturday. A small group of protesters are camped in igloos in Davos to call for more help for the needy.

A member of the Occupy camp was invited to speak at a special event outside the Forum on Friday night discussing the future of capitalism attended by British opposition leader Ed Miliband.

Soon after the panel discussion began, some activists in the audience jumped up and started chanting slogans, and the protester panelist walked off the stage.

Other members of the audience told the activists to "shut up" and arguments disrupted the panel for about 20 minutes. The discussion then resumed, without the Occupy panelist.

Ukraine’s prosecutor general says Israel is refusing to extradite a former presidential bodyguard charged with abuse of office after claiming his boss plotted the murder of an investigative journalist.

Mykola Melnychenko released tapes in which former President Leonid Kuchma is allegedly heard conspiring against Heorhiy Gongadze, who exposed high-level corruption.

Gongadze’s beheaded body was found in a forest outside Kiev in November 2000.

A Ukrainian court cleared Kuchma of involvement last year, while Melnychenko was charged with abuse of office and divulging state secrets, prompting him to flee to Israel.

Prosecutor General Viktor Pshonka told the Interfax news agency Friday that Israel has refused to extradite Melnychenko.

“The question is: can Ukraine return to the path of European integration, or we are stuck at what is in fact a departure from European integration?” he said on Friday during the 8th Davos Ukrainian Lunch organized by the Victor Pinchuk Foundation.

Bildt noted that the Parliamentary Assembly of the Council of Europe had clearly expressed its position that the signing of an association agreement with the EU now depended on how long the former Prime Minister of Ukraine Yulia Tymoshenko remained in prison.

The minister said he did not hear the explanation of this situation in the speech of Ukrainian President Viktor Yanukovych.

Bildt added that Tymoshenko’s case was not the only one, but the most famous of those that cast doubt on the rule of law in Ukraine.

Member of the European Parliament Marek Siwiec, in turn, noted that the main challenge for Ukraine in 2012 would be the elections.

“If they are free, then Ukraine may become the part of Europe, otherwise that’s all – that’s the end of the dream.”

Ukraine plans to launch its first telecommunications satellite – the Lybid – in the fourth quarter of 2013, Head of the State Space Agency of Ukraine Yuriy Alekseyev told journalists in Kyiv on Friday.

Alekseyev said that the satellite is being assembled at the Reshetnev Information Satellite Systems (ISS-Reshetnev, based in Zheleznogorsk, Krasnoyarsk territory, Russia) and its construction is being financed using a $254.6-million loan by Canada’s export credit agency – Export Development Canada (EDC), which was raised against government guarantees in 2009.

According to Alekseyev, the payback period of the project is seven to eight years. In addition to Ukraine, the satellite will cover the territory of Europe, North Africa and Asia.

Foreign customers, in particular India, have already shown interest in the use of Ukraine’s telecommunication satellite, the State Space Agency head said.

A Ukrainian hockey coach charged with fondling a teen player in Philadelphia will remain in custody until a bail hearing next week.

A public defender told a judge Friday that he needs more time to find local friends of Ivan Pravilov, 48, because Pravilov has not had access to his cell phone contacts while in custody. Defense lawyer Mark Wilson said he hopes to find someone willing to house Pravilov until trial.

Federal prosecutors oppose bail, calling the coach a danger and flight risk. There is also an Interpol warrant for his arrest stemming from a 2007 fight in the Ukraine, they said. The bail hearing will resume Wednesday.

Pravilov ran an elite hockey school in the Ukraine from the 1980s until about 2007, when he came to the U.S. to run camps for standout players from the U.S. and abroad. Players from the Ukraine and elsewhere typically enroll for about a month, staying with host families and traveling with Pravilov to various U.S. cities for tournaments and clinics.

On Jan. 3, he allegedly brought two 14-year-old Ukrainian boys to his Philadelphia apartment from a family home in Wilmington, Delaware, and fondled one of the boys during the night, according to the indictment returned Thursday. The other boy was later threatened in a locker room, authorities allege. A host parent contacted police.

Pravilov has been in custody since Homeland Security agents arrested him last week.

An official with the Ukrainian consulate in New York came to court Friday to monitor the hearing, but said he was not authorized to comment.

Pravilov faces six to eight years in prison if convicted of taking a minor over state lines for sexual purposes.

The charges come less than a month after Maxim Starchenko, one of Pravilov’s former players, published a book alleging the coach regularly abused team members physically, mentally and sexually.

Starchenko, the author of “Behind the Iron Curtain: Tears in the Perfect Hockey ‘Gulag,’” played for Pravilov from the age of 8 through 18.

“People need to know what happened,” Starchenko said in a recent interview with The Associated Press. He added, “I hope others will tell their story, the way it was — the way it really was.”

Wilson, the assistant federal public defender representing Pravilov, declined to comment Friday on the case.

The coach’s proteges include New Jersey Devils forward Dainius Zubrus, who’s enjoyed a 15-year career in the NHL. Pravilov uses the New Jersey, home of Zubrus’ mother as his permanent mailing address in the U.S.

Zubrus has not returned requests for comment left with his mother, Irene Zubriene. However, she has said she believes the accusations stem from lingering rivalries in the Ukraine.

“It’s not true. It’s not true,” Zubriene told the AP last week. “Somebody wants to do for him (something) bad. It comes from the Ukraine.”

Ukraine’s space industry increased its output and sales in 2011 by 61.9 percent year-on-year to Hr 3.4 billion.

The industry reported some Hr 76.7 million in net profit in 2011, Interfax-Ukraine learned at the State Space Agency of Ukraine.

According the State Space Agency, last year six launch vehicles produced by Ukraine put twelve spacecraft into orbit including under the orders from foreign customers. Of these, four launches of Zenit rocket were made in the frames of Land Launch project from Baikonur cosmodrome, one Zenit rocket was launched in the frames of the international Sea Launch project from a floating platform in the Pacific Ocean, and one Dnepr rocket was launched from the Yasny launch site in Orenburg region, Russia.

Rapporteur of the Parliamentary Assembly of the Council of Europe (PACE) Marietta de Purba-Lundin expects that the Ukrainian authorities will pay heed to the recommendations of the PACE resolution “The functioning of democratic institutions in Ukraine.”

“Ukraine must fulfill all its commitments undertaken while joining the Council of Europe. However, many of them haven’t been fulfilled yet. We can say the Council of Europe’s patience is running out. The Ukrainian judicial system is still very flawed, which is best exemplified by Yulia Tymoshenko’s case. However, these deficiencies affect not only her. Much needs to be changed still,” the rapporteur said in an interview with Deutsche Welle radio.

She stressed that they studied positions of both the Ukrainian authorities and the opposition before adopting this tough resolution.

“I hope that they will listen to us, in particular members of the authorities. I would rather it didn’t come to the talks about sanctions. But I want to emphasize that we listened to both points of view at the beginning of the week. Therefore, they can be sure that both sides were heard,” she added.

Two launches of Ukrainian-Russian Dnepr rocket scheduled for 2012

Russian Facebook rival eyes 2012 stake sale, IPO

Russia’s biggest social network Vkontakte.ru may sell a small stake ahead of an initial public offering in 2012 or 2013, its co-founder told the website Gazeta.ru, as it seeks to cash-in on the huge popularity of Russian internet IPOs.

The search engine Yandex (YNDX.O) and the internet group Mail.ru  have raised nearly $2.5 billion in New York and London between them in the past 15 months, a quarter of the total raised in all Russian IPOs since the 2008 financial crisis.

“We think it will be possible to proceed with an IPO in 2012 or 2013,” the website’s founder Pavel Durov told Gazeta.ru.

“We may sell a small stake — around 3 percent — before the IPO in order to increase the market capitalization of the company,” he said, adding there were no ongoing talks to sell the stake to Mail.ru, Yandex or Google .

Durov would not comment on how much the company wants to raise or whether it was in talks with investment banks.

Vkontakte.ru, known as Russia’s answer to Facebook, is 39.9 percent owned by Mail.ru, and is therefore likely to need the support of its biggest external investor were it to proceed with the float.

Mail.ru offered to increase its stake to over 50 percent last year in a deal that would have valued the company at $3.75 billion, according to business daily Vedomosti, but Durov and his co-founders did not want to give up a controlling stake.

Mail.ru could not immediately be reached for comment, while Vkontakte did not respond to e-mailed inquiries.

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David Ferguson, an analyst at Renaissance Capital, said Vkontakte.ru could be valued at anything between $1.5 billion and $3 billion, depending on the model used. He added that an acquisition by Mail.ru would generate cost savings as the two companies could share web-hosting operations.

Vkontakte.ru says it has over 100 million registered users and 33 million unique visitors a day, although it is also known to have an issue with spam and with internet piracy.

It generated revenue of $93.8 million in 2010, the last available period for financial figures.

Internet firms have proven more popular with foreign investors than other Russian private companies as they are seen as immune to country-specific risks such as corruption, investors told Reuters last year.

Russia has also fast become Europe’s biggest online market, overtaking Germany in terms of number of unique visitors online, according to internet monitor Comscore.

The high profile of the Yandex and Mail.ru IPOs have echoed the heavy interest in online floats in the United States, including online games maker Zynga (ZNGA.O) and professional network site LinkedIn LNKD.O.

However Yandex shares have halved since the first day of trading following its blockbuster Nasdaq IPO last May, while Mail.ru’s stock is down around 20 percent from its peak.

Russian physicists protest government consolidation

Physicists at one of Russia’s top research institutes say that policies being imposed by the government are hindering their work and have mounted an Internet campaign to recruit help from colleagues elsewhere.

In a bid to bring government-funded fundamental physics research under a single organization, the Russian government has moved the Institute for Theoretical and Experimental Physics (ITEP) in Moscow, along with two other institutions, out of the state-owned nuclear corporation, Rosatom, and into its newly expanded Kurchatov Institute.

“In principle, the idea is not bad — fundamental science should be supported by government” rather than by a state-run corporation, says Pavel Pakhlov, an experimental physicist at the institute who is helping to coordinate the protest. But, Pakhlov says, strict new budgetary and security rules mean that “ITEP will be killed if some reasonable solution cannot be found in the next months”.

The protestors say that the new administration began imposing impossible restrictions on scientists, many of whom work closely with researchers in Switzerland, Japan and the United States, almost immediately after the move was completed on 1 January.

Pakhlov’s work, for instance, depends on use of the Belle particle detector in Japan, but when he sought to make a routine trip there, his request fell afoul of ITEP’s new leadership. “The administration wants to know why we need to go to Japan,” he says. “It really has no idea what is done here at ITEP from a scientific point of view.”

Furthermore, new security procedures have made it nearly impossible for foreign scientists to visit, says Andrei Rostovtsev, another protestor based at ITEP. When an American colleague tried to visit the institute, “he was not even allowed to come to the gates”, Rostovtsev says. And other researchers have had to find off-site locations to meet colleagues from abroad.

Alexander Gorsky, who studies quantum mechanics at the institute, says that that it’s not just experimentalists running into trouble. He says that he received a letter from administrators at the Kurchatov Institute telling him that ITEP theorists should focus on nuclear medicine and ion-beam physics. This “administrative ignorance”, as Gorsky calls it, fails to recognize the lab’s world-class research into areas such as fundamental particle physics and string theory.

Teething troubles

Pakhlov says that much of their frustration stems from uncertainty surrounding the arrangements. Researchers have not been given clear rules for travel or for how to vet visiting researchers. Even their salaries remain in limbo, amid confusion over a new pay system.

Neither Yuri Kozlov, ITEP’s director, nor the press centre at the Kurchatov Institute responded to Nature’s queries by deadline. However, several of ITEP’s alumni say they hope that the tense situation can be salvaged. Andrei Golutvin, a particle physicist at Imperial College in London who worked at ITEP in the 1980s says that the consolidation is the “only possible step” for the institute, because it no longer meets the needs of Rosatom. The shift will inevitably be painful for ITEP’s researchers, he says, but “if things will go right, then I think there is a real possibility to get resources”.

Boris Sharkov, an ITEP alumnus who is now scientific director of the Facility for Antiproton and Ion Research being built in Darmstadt, Germany, agrees, but points out that the institute must also keep its international reputation. “ITEP has to keep its open character to the international community,” he says. Losing the institute in this transition “would be a very big pity”.

Russian security forces clash with militants in Dagestan; 9 killed

Russian security forces clashed with militants in the North Caucasus republic of Dagestan on late Friday evening, leaving four service members and five militants killed. Several others were injured.

The clash happened during a police operation in a forest between Chernyayevka and Ukrainsky in the district of Kizlyar, according to the Itar-Tass news agency. It said the operation, by forces belonging to the Interior Ministry, was carried out to find militants in the region.

“The militants opened fire with a machine gun and sub-machine guns when the police tried to block them in a dugout,” said National Counter Terrorism Committee spokesman Nikolai Sintsov, as quoted by Itar-Tass. He said the militants were members of the so-called Kizlyar group which has previously carried out attacks in the district.

Sintsov said four service members were killed while another four were injured, although their conditions were not immediately known. “All the five militants in the dugout were (also) killed in the clash,” the spokesman added. He said the dugout was found to contain food, equipment, weapons and bomb-making materials.

Militants in the region continue to carry out attacks against security forces, police, and civilians, more than a decade after a separatist war ended in Chechnya. The volatile region of Dagestan neighbors Chechnya where about 50 percent of all militant attacks in Russia took place in 2010.