A recent spate of drone attacks on cargo ships in the Black Sea has raised concerns about the region's security, with two ships struck within Bulgaria's exclusive economic zone.
Former German Chancellor Gerhard Schröder visited a Moscow branch of Hyperglobus, a supermarket chain spun off from Germany's Globus Holding.
A lab worker has died in Siberia and there are fears she may have contracted pneumonic plague, a highly infectious disease.
Anna Politkovskaya's warnings about Putin's authoritarian tendencies and dangers ahead were dismissed as exaggerated at the time, but events have proven her prophetic.
US officials are urging Russia to be more open about what happened at the institute where a 28-year-old woman may have contracted pneumonic plague from a broken test tube.
