About a week ago domain name Sochi.ru – which hosted popular city portal with forums, classifieds, events calendar, news, etc. – was transferred to Organizing Committee “Sochi 2014”.

Why and how this happened is a bit of a mystery. Originally, on August 19, an announcement was posted on the website that the popular portal will move to a new domain – Sochi.com, and included statement that “by the order of the Government of the Russian Federation administration of domain name Sochi.ru goes over to the Organizing Committee “Sochi 2014″”… but later that sentence was removed from the announcement.

Neither Organizing Committee nor previous owner commented this to the media. Most news agencies quoted head of PR of the Ru-Center, .RU’s official domain names registration center, mentioning the “Olympic Law”, which basically makes anything with Sochi Olympics logo and other Olympics-related symbols (and that includes domain names) property of the Organizing Committee. However, not only that makes no sense, since Sochi.com is not much different from Sochi.ru in this respect, but also only combinations of “Sochi” and “2014” fall under that law — this was discussed and explained at the time when this law came into effect.

But this is a done deal – WHOIS info already shows “Organizing Committee “Sochi 2014″” as Sochi.ru’s registrant, and the copy of the original portal already spinning at the Sochi.com. According to the original announcement, anyone who has @sochi.ru email address and all third level domains will exist until the end of this year.

I wonder what project will spin at this address next.

Aeroflot Russian Airlines, Russia’s biggest airline carrier, has been picked as a General Partner for the 2014 Games in the Sochi 2014 Passenger Air Transportation Services category.

The only interesting thing I gather of this news story as far as this blog goes is following statement from the press release: “As part of its partnership programme Aeroflot will increase the number of regular flights bound for Sochi and launch new direct flights from Sochi to parts of Europe.”

The only direct regular flight I know of between Sochi and European city that exist today is Sochi-Vienna operated by Austrian Airlines.

Full press release on this news with other details is available on official Sochi 2014 website.