Moscow/Sochi - The European Union will resume partnership talks with Russia as early as October if Moscow withdraws its troops from the Georgian mainland completely, French Prime Minister Francois Fillon said Saturday after meeting his Russian counterpart Vladimir Putin in the Black Sea resort Sochi.

Putin had promised that the remaining Russian troops would be withdrawn from Georgia, Fillon was quoted as saying by the Interfax news agency after the talks, which also saw France and Russia agree on future cooperation in the area of space aviation.

Moscow, Sept. 20: Russian President Medvedev’s noble gesture to honour Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn’s struggle against totalitarian rule in the former Soviet Union, by naming a street in Moscow after him, has reopened a debate about Russia’s remaining symbols of the communist era.

According to The Times, the decision sparked protests from the small Communist faction on the city council, which complained that it was disrespectful to the revolutionaries who had fought to establish the Soviet regime that Solzhenitsyn helped to destroy.

Moscow - War booty nabbed in the rout of Georgian forces has gone on display at Moscow's military museum, courtesy of the Russian army. And the message is clear.

"We fought the US, that's what this exhibit says. They are responsible for this conflict," Giorgy Gavrikov, 72, a veteran of the Soviet war in Afghanistan, said as he left the small exhibition room that looks to become a permanent part of the Central Army Museum.

Moscow  - President Dmitry Medvedev on Friday repudiated what he said were the West's efforts to drop a new "Iron Curtain" before Russia and blamed NATO for sparking war last month in Georgia.

"We are in effect being pushed down a path that is not based on a full-fledged, civilized partnership with other countries, but on autonomous development, behind deaf walls, behind an Iron Curtain," Medvedev said in a speech to civil society groups in Moscow.

Moscow- Russian Prime Minister Vladimir Putin told investors at a forum in Russia's Black Sea resort of Sochi on Friday that Russia would not play politics with its market and remained open to foreigners despite acrimony over its war with Georgia.

"Our ideology and politics remain the same," Putin told executives. "Confrontation is not our choice. There will be no politically motivated closing of our market or curbs on economic relations."

Moscow/ Sochi, Russia - German ex-chancellor Gerhard Schroeder said Thursday 100 million euros were being spent on an environmental study of the Nord Stream pipeline project for gas from Russia to Germany, which he chairs.

"The most acute problems for the realisation of the Nord Stream project are of course issues over ecological preservation," Schroeder was quoted by Interfax news agency as saying.

He made the comments at a meeting with Russia's premier Vladimir Putin and the head of national energy Gazprom Alexei Miller in the Black Sea resort of Sochi.