PRESIDENT Dmitry Medvedev yesterday slammed the Soviet Union as a totalitarian regime that suppressed human rights, in the most damning assessment of the USSR by a Russian leader in recent years.

ANOTHER week, another record to add to Chelsea’s ever expanding list — most consecutive away wins in top flight football.

Russia’s security chief today said foreign intelligence agents were actively spying on Russia with the help of new Nato members.

A retired Russian secret service colonel was today sentenced by a military court in Moscow to 13 years imprisonment for spying, news agencies reported.

Two Nigerian footballers who claimed to have played for their national team and dreamed of joining Chelsea are in a Russian jail after being caught with forged British passports, their lawyer said in a newspaper interview today.

Russian President Vladimir Putin said today that Russia’s main political task was to develop as a free, democratic nation with European ideals, and stressed individual freedoms would not be compromised by the state’s own strengthening.

Residents of three sparsely populated Siberian regions have voted to reunite in a resource-rich territory that will be larger than Western Europe, Russian media reported today, extending the trend to increased Kremlin control over the country’s far-flung provinces.

The hunt for Red October can be called off: Russia will scrap the submarine that some say inspired the famous Cold War novel and film.

RUSSIA’s top general said yesterday he was ready to attack ‘terrorist bases’ anywhere in the world, as security services put an €8.5 million bounty on two Chechen rebels blamed for last week’s school siege.

RUSSIAN media yesterday savaged President Vladimir Putin as the respected editor of Russia’s Izvestia daily was forced to quit in what he and media analysts linked to the paper’s critical coverage of the authorities’ handling of the school siege.

The respected editor of Russia’s Izvestia daily was forced to quit today in what he and media analysts linked to the paper’s critical coverage of the Russian authorities’ handling of the school siege.

A respected Russian editor was sacked today after his newspaper published pages of photos of wounded and dead children and other victims of the school hostage crisis.

A SHAKEN President Vladimir Putin went on national television this weekend to make a rare and candid admission of Russian weakness in the face of an "all-out war" by terrorists.

A hostage released from a provincial Russian school said there are at least 1,500 people being held there by armed militants, the Izvestia newspaper reported today, and a local legislator announced a similar figure challenging far-lower official numbers.

They lived in the same apartment in Chechnya, worked in the same market and possibly died within moments of each other on separate airliners that crashed in Russia last week.

US Secretary of State Colin Powell said yesterday no support should be given to Georgia's restive regions, a day after Georgia accused Russia of meddling in its domestic affairs.

Mexico has forged a new alliance with Moscow to challenge a common enemy: the recently imposed total ban on smoking on the grounds of UN headquarters in New York.

THE Kremlin’s candidate Akhmad Kadyrov won a landslide victory in Chechnya’s presidential election but few voters believed he would bring a rapid end to the fighting that has devastated their republic.

Twenty-eight children were killed today in southern Russia when a fire roared through a boarding school for the deaf.

At least 114 servicemen were killed when the world’s biggest helicopter, probably carrying almost double its permitted load, crashed outside a Russian base in Chechnya, state television reported today.

A note left by a dying officer on the Kursk says the nuclear submarine was sunk by the explosion of one of its own torpedoes, reports a Russian newspaper.