Berlin  - Moscow will not let itself be drawn into a confrontation with the West, a senior Russian diplomat said Wednesday, one day before a top-level Russian-German meeting.

"We haven't broken off dialogue. We haven't pulled back the hand (of friendship)," ambassador to Berlin, Vladimir Kotenyev, said in an interview with Deutsche Presse-Agentur dpa.

"We favour cooperation at international level with all players. Russia is not going to let itself be drawn into a confrontation."

Germany's Chancellor Angela Merkel was set to meet with Russian leaders on Thursday in St Petersburg, Russia for annual talks.

Moscow  - At least five students were killed when a school stairwell collapsed, a spokesman for the Russian Civil Defence Ministry said Wednesday.

Deauville, France  - European Union defence ministers were due to meet in the French coastal town of Deauville on Wednesday as the bloc's observers began a delicate ceasefire monitoring mission in Georgia.

Some 350 observers from 22 EU countries are tasked with ensuring that Russian troops withdraw to the positions they held prior to the August conflict, as agreed in a September 8 peace deal brokered by French President Nicolas Sarkozy.

Initial reports out of the South Caucasus indicated that the observers were having some difficulties being allowed into the buffer zones around South Ossetia and Abkhazia.

Tbilisi/Moscow - EU observers started their mission Wednesday to monitor the Russo-Georgian ceasefire agreement one and half months after conflict flared between the two countries over Georgia's breakaway regions of South Ossetia and Abkhazia.

Russian troops still in Georgia prevented the observers from entering the security zone they set up around South Ossetia.

"It is not a categorical ban on the EU mission; it's just that the details of the monitoring mission have not been cleared up yet," a Russian military spokesman told Interfax news agency.

Moscow - Former Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev is planning the launch of new Russian political party with the support of billionaire and former KGB officer Aleksander Lebedev, Vedomosti newspaper reported Tuesday.

The new political grouping named the Independent Democratic Party (IDP) will aim at putting candidates into parliament in Russia's 2011 elections.

The IDP's main platform will be the development of independent state and social institutions and particularly a national television broadcaster that would not take orders from the government, Vedemosti reported.

New Delhi, Sep 30 : Russia’s United Aircraft Corporation (UAC) has said that it had started talks with Indian firms on the delivery of SuperJet-100 passenger airliners and other civil aircraft to the country.

The SuperJet-100 project is a family of medium-haul passenger aircraft developed by the Sukhoi Design Bureau in cooperation with major US and European aviation corporations, including Boeing, Snecma, Thales, Messier Dowty, Liebherr Aerospace and Honeywell.

“We have started preliminary talks with a number of Indian companies on the delivery of SuperJet-100 airliners,’ Alexei Fyodorov, UAC’s general director, said here without specifying the potential customers.