UN Security Council talks on more sanctions against Iran were cancelled when Russia withdrew from a meeting planned this week in New York, Russian officials said Wednesday.

An official in the Russian delegation to the UN told news agency Ria-Novosti that Foreign Minster Sergei Lavrov could not take attend due to "the intensity of his schedule."

The Foreign Ministry, meanwhile, said it saw no need for an emergency session on Iran.

New York -Georgian President Mikheil Saakashvili issued a dramatic call late Tuesday for the United Nations to mediate in the Caucasus republic's conflict with Russia and breakaway regions South Ossetia and Abkhazia, in a speech to the UN General Assembly.

Saakashvili called on the UN to denounce Russia's "brutal invasion" of his country last month and to help implement a stalled ceasefire plan that calls for a complete pullback of Russian troops from Georgian territory.

Moscow - A Russian Navy battalion left for Venezuela on Monday, a navy spokesman said, in a show of force in US-patrolled waters that could exacerbate a tense security standoff with Washington.

Last week, two nuclear-capable Russian bombers flew military exercises over the US fleet in the Caribbean at the invitation of US foe Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez, who plans to visit Moscow next week.

There has been no such deployment - including nuclear-powered cruiser Peter the Great which is outfitted with torpedoes, 500 missiles and anti-submarine aircraft - in Western waters since Cold War days.

Joint Russo-Venezuelan naval exercises are set for mid November.

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.