they didn't give it to them for "nothing". There was a stock deal.
There is also a few million (can't remember exactly how much) that Aurus owes. A common accounting practice is to space out payments for an asset over a given number of years.
This means that if they are spacing the cost to mine the properties over the 10-year life, then the amount of cash they are going to end up paying to the Russian government will be 10 X whatever their short/current long term debt is. So they more than likely are owing about $150 million for the property mining rights.
They report it this way for a number of reasons.
They don't show the entire cost of the asset in one year, the same way you don't report the salvage of a valuable piece of property in one quarter as rise in net income.
If you do that then a lot of people buy in, the next quarter they don't sell any assets, and the net income is down 45% or whatever it was up the previous quarter because of it.
I think it was worldcom that didn't follow this practice and got into a bunch of trouble.