The U.S. automaker’s board of directors voted late Tuesday in Detroit to scrap the sale following seven months of heated negotiations in Europe and the United States, a decision that provoked 'surprise' from Russia.

While the rest of the world is commemorating the 20th-year anniversary of the fall of the Iron Curtain, Russia is left wondering why it has so little to celebrate.

Russia had been hoping that closer ties with Opel would help reinvigorate its own flailing car industry, which currently requires huge levels of state support just to maintain operations.

When asked by a reporter why he did not use force to halt the 1989 demonstrations that preceded the Berlin Wall's fall, Gorbachev said Tuesday that it would have sparked a catastrophic set of events and even a world war.

In previous years, nationalist young people left the government red-faced by marching through central Moscow while chanting racist slogans and raising their arms in Nazi-style salutes.

The looming change stirred fears Thursday about a crackdown on free speech on the country's No. 1 search engine.

On the whole, the Kremlin has little to worry about since the threat from protests is very low, which may explain why the training that riot police received last week was focused on rounding up a bunch of frail pensioners.

The president said he had signed amendments to the Criminal Code that envisioned up to life in prison for gangster ringleaders and increased prison terms for people convicted of participating in organized crime.

The suspected gunman, Nikita Tikhonov, has the same name as a man accused by Markelov in a hate murder three years earlier.

Kalmanovich, 60, was gunned down in central Moscow on Monday in an apparent contract hit that authorities said might be connected to a debt deal gone bad or an ongoing gangster turf war.