The East-West standoff over the Ukraine crisis has brought the threat of nuclear war in Europe closer than at any time since the 1980s, a former Russian foreign minister warned on Saturday.

• March 19, 2016

The ceasefire in Syria is broadly holding but the United States should be doing more to support it, Russia's Defence Ministry said in a statement on Saturday.

• March 19, 2016

Iran's Foreign Minister Mohammad Javad Zarif joined his Turkish hosts in Istanbul on Saturday in condemning a suicide bombing by suspected Kurdish militants in a main shopping district that killed five people.

• March 19, 2016

President Vladimir Putin said on Thursday that Russia could scale up its military presence in Syria again within hours and would still bomb terrorist groups there despite a partial draw-down of forces ordered after military successes.

• March 17, 2016

Russian Prime Minister Dmitry Medvedev agreed to slash funding for Russia's space program by 30 percent on Thursday, an effort to reign in state spending in the face of a deepening economic crisis.

• March 17, 2016

China expressed its opposition on Thursday to unilateral sanctions against North Korea saying they could raise tension, after the United States imposed new curbs on the isolated country in retaliation for its nuclear and rocket tests.

• March 17, 2016

Russia's withdrawal of forces from Syria was no surprise to Damascus, Bashar Ja'afari, head of the Syrian government delegation at peace talks in Geneva, said on Wednesday.

• March 16, 2016

Indian state companies signed energy deals worth billions of dollars with Russia's Rosneft on Wednesday to buy into its most promising assets in Siberia, stepping up a drive to cut New Delhi's dependence on imports.

• March 16, 2016