* Russia and Germany signed a number of agreements in the banking, transportation and information sectors following bilateral consultations
* President Vladimir Putin said Russia would pay off all its debts to the Paris Club of creditors by the end of the year
* Russian Finance Minister Alexei Kudrin said Russia was willing to pay Germany $9.5 billion in lieu of its Soviet-era bilateral debt
* Gazprom (RTS: GAZP) and Germany's BASF (LSE: BFA) signed an agreement to produce 25 billion cubic meters of natural gas a year for the next 30 years
* A Minsk court jailed Alexander Milinkevich, Belarus' main opposition leader, for 15 days for taking part in an unauthorized demonstration Wednesday. The European Commission condemned the arrest and called for his immediate release
* Spokesman for the Russian Foreign Ministry Mikhail Kamynin said NATO enlargement and the accession of Georgia and Ukraine to the alliance would force Moscow to spend considerable sums on reorienting its military capabilities
* Russia Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov dismissed claims the country would use its vast energy resources as a way of producing pressure to get its own way in the international arena
* Russia's Federal Security Service said a group of terrorists preparing an attack on May 9 - when Russia celebrates the end of World War II - had been eliminated in southern Russia
* A court in central Russia sentenced a 19-year old Russian to 13 years in prison after he was convicted of fatally stabbing two North Korean nationals
* RusAl, Russia's largest aluminum producer, said it had signed a memorandum of intent with TAIF Group on building a $400 million petrochemicals processing plant in the Volga republic of Tatarstan
* Chery Automobile Co. Ltd, a Chinese state-controlled company, started manufacturing its first batch of automobiles at a plant in the Kaliningrad Region, Russia's exclave in the EU
Russia Thursday
