Moscow- Russia is prepared to make plans to deploy missiles in its Kaliningrad exclave "disappear" if the United States drops plans to base part of its missile defence system in Poland and the Czech Republic, Russia's prime minister said Monday.
If the new administration of US president-elect Barack Obama drops deployment plans for a missile shield in what Russia considers to be within its sphere of influence, then "questions of our retaliatory measures will disappear by themselves," Russian Prime Minister Vladimir Putin told journalists at a forum in St Petersburg.
Kiev - Ukraine's decision to honour millions of people who died of famine in the 1930s has drawn cries of historical revisionism from Russia, which disputes claims that the Stalin-era government targeted Ukrainians with policies that allowed the famine.
Historians generally agree that the famine was a side effect of a campaign by dictator Josef Stalin's communists against rich farmers in the former Soviet Union.
Moscow - Russian energy company Gazprom on Saturday threatened to cut off gas deliveries to Ukraine starting January 1 unless Ukraine pays 2.4 billion dollars of debt and finalizes new contracts for future deliveries.
Gazprom spokesman Sergei Kupriyanov, quoted by the Interfax News Agency, dismissed arguments from Kiev that payments had been delayed due to the ongoing financial crisis.
"If the Ukrainian economy were really in a crisis, they would need less energy from us. There has been no sign of that," he said, adding that Ukraine cannot expect to receive billion-dollar bail- outs from the International Monetary Fund on the one hand and refuse to pay its debts to Russia on the other.
Moscow - President Dmitry Medvedev is due to visit Venezuela and Cuba as part of a week-long tour through South America that underscores Russia's revival of Soviet-era ties in the region along old lines of opposition to US hegemony.
Medvedev's four-nation trip began Friday in Peru at the forum of Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation, or APEC, where he will participate alongside outgoing US President George W Bush and Chinese President Hu Jintao.
Tallinn - Estonia's president, Toomas Hendrik Ilves, on Friday called on his countrymen to set aside ethnic differences in a speech in the capital, Tallinn.
"An ethnic Russian who is a resident of Estonia is not a priori the supporter of Russia's national policies, just as every Estonian is not automatically a supporter of the [Andrus] Ansip government. Citizens of democratic countries do not connect their love of country with the person of the prime minister or president who happens to be in power at the time," Ilves said.
Andrus Ansip is the current prime minister of Estonia.
Moscow- Russia is prepared to make plans to deploy missiles in its Kaliningrad exclave "disappear" if the United States drops plans to base part of its missile defence system in Poland and the Czech Republic, Russia's prime minister said Monday.
Kiev - Ukraine's decision to honour millions of people who died of famine in the 1930s has drawn cries of historical revisionism from Russia, which disputes claims that the Stalin-era government targeted Ukrainians with policies that allowed the famine.
Moscow - President Dmitry Medvedev is due to visit Venezuela and Cuba as part of a week-long tour through South America that underscores Russia's revival of Soviet-era ties in the region along old lines of opposition to US hegemony.
