* Russia is ready to support the deployment of peacekeepers in the Palestinian-Israeli conflict zone if the conflicting sides deem it necessary, Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov said
* Russia's civilian nuclear agency said construction work on the Bushehr nuclear power plant in Iran will continue as long as it remains within the bounds of international law
* Alexei Miller, the head of Gazprom confirmed that the Russian energy giant will ensure supplies of 21 billion cubic meters of natural gas to Belarus in 2006
* Russia will announce next week the start of a procedure to exchange the second tranche of its Soviet-era commercial debt, a Finance Ministry spokesman said
* Russian midterm macroeconomic performance forecasts suggest the government's target of doubling GDP by the end of this decade will hardly be possible to meet, the Audit Chamber said
* Prosecutors in St. Petersburg said they have revealed numerous flight safety violations at the Pulkovo airport and Pulkovo Airlines, based in Russia's second city, and that they have opened several administrative offence cases against the companies
* Russia is ready to meet its international obligations on the destruction of its chemical weapons stockpiles, presidential envoy to the Volga Federal District, Alexander Konovalov said
* Five central Asian states - Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Tajikistan, Turkmenistan and Uzbekistan - signed a treaty establishing a nuclear-free zone in Central Asia
* Four people have been killed in the conflict zone between Georgia and its breakaway region of South Ossetia, Marat Kulakhmetov, the commander of the Joint Peacekeeping Force said
* Ukrainian President Viktor Yushchenko was poisoned during his 2004 election campaign with dioxin made in Russia, the U.S. or Britain, Ukraine's Prosecutor General, Oleksandr Medvedko, said
