News Highlights

The EU will not accept a “veto” by Russia on the bloc’s ties with former Soviet republics, European Commission President Jose Manuel Barroso has said.

Moscow is determined to eradicate what it describes as “double standards” at the UN Human Rights Council, Russian diplomats said at a human rights meeting with the European Union on Friday.

Orthodox Christian activists burst onstage during a rendition of Oscar Wilde’s “The Ideal Husband” and berated the audience of Moscow theatergoers for tolerating blasphemy.

One Syrian was killed and nine others were injured during a mortar shelling of the Russian embassy in Damascus, the Russian foreign ministry said in a statement on Thursday.

President Traian Basescu, a noted critic of Moscow, said Romania and Moldova should end the partition that was placed upon them during a pact between Stalin and Hitler at the beginning of World War II.

Moscow — Russian investigators on Thursday brought criminal charges against former defence minister Anatoly Serdyukov, who was fired a year ago in a major corruption scandal.

Five years after it fought a war with Russia, Georgia is preparing to defy its former Soviet masters again by initialing an accord on strengthening ties with Europe.

A suspected militant killed in Russia’s volatile North Caucasus republic of Dagestan on Tuesday was identified as a local gang leader, Russia’s anti-terrorism authority said Wednesday.

Russian police said Wednesday they have detained a group of people presumed to be members of a banned radical Islamist sect carrying ammunition and an explosive suicide belt.

Nearly half of Russians think that the State Duma, the Russia’s lower house of parliament, plays too little a role in the country’s political process to be needed, a survey indicated.