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 officials are examining the wreckage of two crashed planes today in an effort to determine whether a terrorist attack caused the near-simultaneous disasters that killed all 89 people aboard.

In the first sign that the government might compromise to save the Yukos oil company from bankruptcy over back taxes, Russian news agencies reported today that the Cabinet was considering a Yukos proposal to pay £5bn (€7.5bn) over a three-year period.

A WOMAN suicide bomber ambushed a bus carrying Russian air force pilots near rebel Chechnya yesterday, blowing it up and killing herself and at least 17 others, government officials said.

Attempts to save the crew of Russia’s Kursk nuclear submarine were doomed by mistakes and sloppiness, not least the failure of a top admiral to realise anything had gone wrong, a government report has revealed.

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.

THE Russian government confirmed yesterday that leaked torpedo fuel and not a foreign submarine or a Second World War mine caused the explosions that destroyed the Kursk nuclear submarine.

The Russian government confirmed today that leaky torpedo fuel - and not a foreign submarine or a Second World War mine - caused the explosions that destroyed the Kursk nuclear submarine.

Two deserters from the Russian army shot and killed two police officers who stopped their stolen car at a traffic checkpoint in southern Russia, officials said today.

Three Russian admirals have been dismissed over the Kursk disaster.

The sinking of the Kursk was not caused by a collision with a foreign submarine, the leading investigator into the disaster says.

Investigators today revealed the ‘‘hell’’ inside the nuclear submarine Kursk which sank in the Barents Sea with the loss of 118 lives.

Forensic experts are beginning to remove bodies from the wreck of the Kursk.

In a renewed attack on former Kremlin insiders, authorities in Russia issued an arrest warrant for tycoon Boris Berezovsky and charged railways minister Nikolai Aksyonenko, the state prosecutor said yesterday.

The Kursk has surfaced for the first time since it sank with the loss of all hands.

The wreck of the Kursk nuclear submarine began moving toward a dry dock in the northern Russian port of Roslyakovo today, despite high winds that could hinder the operation.

Three simultaneous car bomb blasts killed at least 21 people and wounded more than 100 others today in southern Russia near the breakaway republic of Chechnya.