The Russian Far East is “drifting away” from the rest of the country, according to an investigation carried out by Nezavisimaya gazeta – Regiony, and the Kremlin’s much-ballyhooed program intended to reverse that process may in fact be making it worse.

Russia’s Muslims are beginning to change the way they talk about the relationship between their religious community and their country, a shift that reflects their own growing self-confidence but one that frightens many ethnic Russians who see it as a threat to their own status.

A BILLIONAIRE businessman living in Britain fears he has been targeted in an assassination plot being planned in the former Soviet republic of Georgia.