Japanese Prime Minister Yasuo Fukuda and President Vladimir Putin agreed on Saturday to expedite talks to resolve a decades-old territorial dispute by issuing “fresh directives” to their respective governments, Japan’s Foreign Ministry said.

One day after Dmitry Medvedev was elected president, rock star Andrei Makarevich and his band, Mashina Vremeni, entertained a crowd of pro-Kremlin youth activists on Red Square.

Tensions between Moscow and Tbilisi escalated over the weekend amid reports that Russian military reinforcements were being deployed in Georgia's breakaway republic of Abkhazia and local residents were being forced to swap their ID cards for Russian passports.

A table laid out with platters of blini, beets and caviar and a bottle of 2001 Montrachet awaits Oleg Deripaska and his guests in a dining room at his Moscow headquarters. While others dig in, Deripaska sips only black tea and nibbles on toast.

Oleg Deripaska’s United Company RusAl said Friday it would seek to combine with Norilsk Nickel, the country’s biggest mining company, in the next year and may buy shares on the open market.

While Russian brands remain less recognized on a global scale than their Western and Chinese counterparts, names such as MTS, LUKoil and Baltika have started to ring a bell on the international stage.

If American voters are discouraged by a seemingly endless and increasingly hyperbolic presidential campaign -- now called ""The Campaign That Would Not Die"" by some and disparaged last week by The New York Times as ""meaner, more vacuous, more desperate, and more filled with pandering"" as it drags on -- they might want to consider what Russian voters have had to put up with after the formidably brief and utterly unhyperbolic presidential campaign here.

Azerbaijan's capital, Baku, welcomed back one of its most famous families last week as a descendant of the Nobel brothers returned to the city where his ancestors made huge fortunes during the Caspian Sea oil boom more than a century ago.