Pro-Russian separatists will vote to set up a breakaway regional leadership in eastern Ukraine on Sunday aiming to take their war-torn region closer to Russia and defying Kiev and the West as the big guns still boom across the territory.
NATO aircraft tracked Russian strategic bombers over the Atlantic and Black Sea on Wednesday and sorties of fighters over the Baltic in what the Western alliance called an unusual burst of activity at a tense time in East-West relations.
When Sunni rebels rose up against Syria's Bashar al-Assad in 2011, Turkey reclassified its protégé as a pariah, expecting him to lose power within months and join the autocrats of Egypt, Libya, Tunisia and Yemen on the scrap heap of the "Arab Spring".
Pro-Europe parties secured a big win in an election in Ukraine, a partial vote count showed on Monday, with President Petro Poroshenko hailing people's support for his plan to end a separatist war and pursue democratic reforms sought by the West.
President Petro Poroshenko called on Ukrainians on Saturday to elect a majority on Sunday that would see through a pro-Europe, reform agenda and break with the Soviet past.
A French appeals court approved on Friday the extradition from France to Russia or Ukraine of jailed Kazakh tycoon Mukhtar Ablyazov, accused of embezzling up to $6 billion from his former bank BTA.
The chief executive of French oil major Total, Christophe de Margerie, was killed when a business jet collided with a snow plow during takeoff at Moscow's Vnukovo International Airport, the company and airport officials said.
The number of times Japanese fighter jets scrambled to ward off Russian military aircraft more than doubled in the last six months, amid diplomatic tensions between the two countries which Prime Minister Shinzo Abe is keen to ease.
Russian President Vladimir Putin is guest of honor at a military parade in Belgrade on Thursday to mark 70 years since the city's liberation by the Red Army, a visit loaded with symbolism as Serbia walks a tightrope between the Europe it wants to join and a big-power ally it cannot leave behind.
Russia has joined Iran in suggesting that a late November deadline for reaching an agreement to end a long-running dispute over Tehran's nuclear program may need to be extended.
On the first day of school outside the east Ukrainian rebel stronghold of Donetsk, 11th-grade teacher Yelena Sepik tells her class to get out of their seats to clap and sing along to the Soviet military music playing over the speakers.
Latvia's center-right government held a clear lead in a general election on Saturday after taking a hard line over the actions of neighbor and former ruler Russia in Ukraine.
Ukrainian state prosecutors said on Tuesday they had opened a criminal investigation against a Russian law enforcement agency, accusing it of supporting separatist and "terrorist" groups in the east of the country.
Looking to put a patriotic spin on international sanctions over Ukraine, a local group is touring Moscow, urging passers-by to swap their Western-branded T-shirts for homegrown tops sporting pro-Russian slogans.
German opposition lawmakers appealed to the Constitutional Court to oblige the government to bring ex-U.S. spy contractor Edward Snowden to Germany to testify before a parliamentary committee investigating espionage.
President Petro Poroshenko proclaimed reforms on Thursday spanning all aspects of life to make strife-torn Ukraine fit for European Union membership, warning his people that without reform they would face a future "alone with Russia."
NATO has observed a significant withdrawal of Russian forces from inside Ukraine, but many Russian troops remain stationed nearby, an alliance military spokesman said on Wednesday.
About 60,000 Syrian Kurds fled into Turkey in the space of 24 hours, a deputy prime minister said on Saturday, as Islamic State militants seized dozens of villages close to the border.
Ukraine ratified a sweeping agreement with the European Union on Tuesday - an issue at the heart of the Russia-West crisis over its future - and sought to blunt the independence drive of Russian-backed separatists by offering them temporary and limited self-rule.
Six months after Russia annexed Crimea, residents of the Black Sea peninsula cast their first votes in a Russian election - an election many of them are calling unfair and undemocratic.
Russia said on Thursday it was dissatisfied with talks held with U.S. officials to address concerns that Moscow had violated a Cold War-era arms control agreement by testing a ground-launched cruise missile.
