Moscow, Russia (August 2, 2006)Golden Telecom, Inc. (“Golden Telecom” or “the Company”) (NASDAQ: GLDN), today announced that Sergey Avetisyan has been appointed as Vice President and Head of  Marketing & Business Development of Golden Telecom. 

Before joining Golden Telecom, Mr. Avetisyan served as the General Director of Kuban GSM, the largest wireless operator in the South of Russia. Under his management, Kuban GSM doubled its subscribers base within one and a half years, up to 5 million people.

From 2003 to 2004, Mr. Avetisyan worked as Corporate Accounts Director of Comstar-UTS, one of Russia’s largest telecom operators, where he acted as head of integration of the commercial departments of MTU-Inform, Telmos and Comstar into a single department.

From 1996 to 2003, Mr. Avetisyan worked in various positions at Combellga, a major communication services provider in Moscow at that time. While working in Combellga as Sales and New Products Director (1998-2003), Mr. Avetisyan successfully managed the roll out of several high-tech services, including the first digital subscriber line (DSL) project in Russia.

Mr. Avetisyan studied automatic telecommunications at Moscow Technical University for Communications and Information Technologies.

Jean-Pierre Vandromme, Chief Executive Officer of Golden Telecom, commented: “Mr. Avetisyan was at the forefront of launching and developing broadband access services, which were unique and totally new to the Russian market.

As a head of Kuban GSM he gained significant experience working on the mass market. I believe that Sergey’s knowledge and skills will help Golden Telecom in implementation of its key strategy – developing broadband access and utilizing of Golden Telecom’s long distance license”.

Sergey Avetisyan added: “It is a great privilege for me that my experience is appreciated by such a large telecommunications player as Golden Telecom. I am extremely interested in the tasks that the Company presents, particularly, in its broadband access rollout strategy. Broadband access is at the forefront of technological progress throughout the world. I am thankful to Golden Telecom for inviting me to use my 12 years of experience in telecommunications on these interesting and challenging projects.”