Budapest - NATO on Thursday said Russia had been fully informed about a cooperation agreement signed in late September by the alliance and the United Nations.

"We briefed the Russians on a regular basis on this. Everybody in the UN knew. We don't understand their concern at this stage," NATO spokesman James Appathurai told reporters on the sidelines of a NATO defence ministers' meeting in Budapest.

Russian news agency Itar-Tass quoted Russian Defence Minister Sergei Lavrov as expressing "surprise" at what was being described by the Russian media as "a secret deal".

Moscow- Russia said on Thursday it had handed over control in the buffer zones around Georgia's rebel regions to an EU observer mission as France's foreign minister was due in Georgia to verify the pull out.

Moscow  - Russia denied it has plans to sell state-of-the-art missile systems to Iran, a Foreign Ministry spokesman said Thursday, in response to questions about Israeli security concerns.

"We have repeatedly declared at the highest political level that we are not going to deliver those kinds of arms into the countries which are in, to put it mildly, unstable areas," Andrei Nesterenko told journalists at a briefing in Moscow Thursday.

Moscow  - Russia's two leading exchanges rebounded at the start of trading Thursday after a week of staggering losses in Russia's worst financial crisis since the national debt default of 1998.

The benchmark RTS rose 11.93 per cent to 852.22 points by mid- morning, while the ruble-denominated MICEX index scaled more than 14 per cent.

Russia's second-largest oil firm Lukoil led the climb in share prices on the MICEX with a 21.13-per-cent increase, while state monopoly Gazprom gained 11.36 per cent.

A day earlier, market watchdogs had promised to close the MICEX exchange until Friday and the RTS indefinitely as shares toppled. Trading has been halted 11 times in the last three weeks.

Moscow - Russian state television has lowered the pitch of its coverage of the most devastating financial crisis to hit the markets in over a decade at the Kremlin's behest, the Moscow Times reported Thursday, citing media monitoring firms.

Kremlin officials have banned the use of the terms "crisis" and "collapse" on the country's main television channels, the newspaper quoted Ekho Moskvy radio sation deputy editor Vladimir Varfolomeyev as saying.

Brussels - The European Union's top foreign-policy official, Javier Solana, on Wednesday hailed Russian moves to pull out of parts of Georgia.