President Bashar al-Assad said it would not be difficult to agree on a new Syrian government including opposition figures, but his opponents responded on Wednesday that no administration would be legitimate while he remained in office.

• March 31, 2016

Russia is moving further away from having Western sanctions lifted over its role in the Ukraine crisis, British Foreign Secretary Philip Hammond told Reuters on Wednesday.

• March 30, 2016

When Vladimir Putin announced the withdrawal of most of Russia's military contingent from Syria there was an expectation that the Yauza, a Russian naval icebreaker and one of the mission's main supply vessels, would return home to its Arctic Ocean port.

• March 30, 2016

Four months after President Vladimir Putin accused Ankara of a "stab in the back", Turkish business executives in Russia are getting used to saying hasty goodbyes.

• March 30, 2016

A senior U.S. diplomat said on Tuesday he hopes China will accept an offer by the United States for a technical briefing on the possible deployment of a U.S. THAAD missile defense system to South Korea, which worries Beijing.

• March 29, 2016

Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu will meet Russian President Vladimir Putin in Moscow on April 21 to discuss security issues in the Middle East, an Israeli political source said on Tuesday.

• March 29, 2016

China has ordered power transmission companies to provide grid connectivity for all renewable power generation sources and end a bottleneck that has left a large amount of clean power idle, the country's energy regulator said on Monday.

• March 28, 2016

The director of the U.S. Central Intelligence Agency raised the issue of Syrian President Bashar al-Assad leaving power when he visited Moscow at the start of March, RIA news agency said on Monday, citing the U.S. Embassy in Russia.

• March 28, 2016