President Vladimir Putin on Tuesday agreed to lead United Russia as its new party chairman in a move expected to shore up his political power after he leaves office next month.

When Abdulmalik Gadzhiyev competed in a martial arts tournament in Turkey last year, he fought under the flag of the United Arab Emirates, and his travel expenses were covered by a member of Dubai’s ruling family.

President Vladimir Putin on Thursday will become the first foreign leader to meet with Italian Prime Minister-elect Silvio Berlusconi since his parliamentary election victory, the Kremlin and Berlusconi’s press office said Tuesday.

The sale of a controlling stake in electricity producer OGK-1, whose sale could raise as much as $7 billion, will be delayed, Unified Energy System said in a statement Tuesday.

Four of the five mines at United Company RusAl's bauxite mines in the Sverdlovsk region resumed operations Tuesday, as more than 5,000 miners agreed to return to work.

In Winston Churchill's memoirs, he records a meeting with Josef Stalin in October 1944: ""The moment was apt for business, so I said 'Let us settle our affairs in the Balkans. ... So far as Britain and Russia are concerned, how would it do for you to have 90 percent predominance in Romania, for us to have 90 percent of the say in Greece and go 50-50 about Yugoslavia?'

Russian women remain skeptical about oral contraceptives.