As a European Union report into last year’s conflict between Georgia and Russia puts a large part of the blame on Georgia, the BBC’s Tom Esslemont in Tbilisi asks where this leaves the small Caucasian nation. Even before the EU-sponsored...

European leaders gather in the Polish city of Gdansk today to mark the 70th anniversary of the start of the Second World War, amid an acrimonious row between Moscow and much of Europe over who started the conflict. The heavily politicised spat has been...

Russia’s government has issued a tender for luxury furniture, including a gilded bed, triggering an outcry Wednesday in a country where the economy shrank 10.9 percent in the last quarter. The interior ministry said it wanted a cherry wood bed...

Anatoly Boiko stands in front of a pile of neatly sawn planks. The wood, he says, is one of the oddest government handouts he’s ever received. To help the unemployed, Vologda, the cash-strapped region where Mr. Boiko lives, is giving residents...

State capital investments into serial production of armaments and military hardware in 2009-2011 will total about $35.3 billion, a first deputy chairman of Russia’s military-industrial commission said Monday.

A previously unknown population of vampire moths has been found in Siberia. And in a twist worthy of a Halloween horror movie, entomologists say the bloodsuckers may have evolved from a purely fruit-eating species.

celand got a 4 billion-euro ($5.43 billion) loan from Russia, pegged the krona to a trade-weighted index and nationalized the nation’s second-biggest bank after the currency’s slump and bad debts crippled the financial system.

This is a bit of a long shot but reading this report in the UK’s Daily Telegraph about Russia using big a good harvest as a foreign policy tool, got me thinking about the possibility of it becoming a biofuel superpower.

On 7 August Russia invaded Georgia. Within 5 days it looked as if the whole country would be overrun. Sarkozy, holder of the six month rotating presidency of the EU, brokered a peace deal. In Le Figaro he boasted how the EU rose to the occasion. His...

As the oldest, largest and deepest lake on planet Earth, ancient Lake Baikal is known as the “grand dame” of all lakes. UNESCO declared it a World Heritage due to its stunning bio-diversity. Most of its 2500 some odd plant and animal species,...