Moscow

Belarus is a fully-fledged dictatorship after a rigged vote allowing an autocratic president to keep power, and is a ”testing ground” for similar plans in Russia, Belarus opposition leaders said in Moscow on Tuesday. ”My friends, what is happening today in Belarus … is your future,” one such leader warned.

They lived in the same apartment, worked in the same market and — possibly — died within moments of each other on separate airliners that crashed in Russia last week. New details emerged on Monday about the two Chechen women who are the focus of suspicions that the planes were blown up by terrorists. But questions also arose.

At least one of the two Russian plane crashes that killed 90 people this week was the result of a terrorist attack, a top Russian security service spokesperson said on Friday. Meanwhile, an Islamic group calling itself the Islambouli Brigades claimed responsibility on Friday for the crashes of both Russian planes.

Four Russian doctors who were arrested as they tried to remove both kidneys from a critically injured but still living patient will stand trial for attempted murder, the Russian prosecutor’s office said on Wednesday. The doctors were planning to use the kidneys for transplantation.

The Moscow diocese of the Russian Orthodox Church has commissioned a church on a truck that will be able to travel across isolated regions to reach those who have no houses of worship of their own, Itar-Tass news agency reported on Tuesday. The church will be built on a 15m Kamaz truck base and will include a dome.

Mikhail Khodorkovsky, jailed owner of embattled oil giant Yukos, on Wednesday asked shareholders to remove Viktor Gerashchenko, recently appointed in an attempt to end the firm’s ongoing feud with the state. Gerashchenko’s efforts to end the deadlock in negotiations with Moscow have been largely ineffectual.

A landslide in southern Kyrgyzstan has killed 33 people, Russian news agencies reported on Monday, citing emergency officials in the mountainous Central Asian country. Twelve people have been hospitalised as a result of the slide near the village of Budalyk.

A total of 47 miners died as a result of the weekend’s pit explosion in central Siberia, Russian rescuers said on Monday as remains of most victims were pulled from the collapsed facility. After recovering 44 bodies, officials said they held out no hopes of saving three missing men at the Taizhina mine.

Russia’s navy chief said on Tuesday that he has ordered the nuclear battle cruiser Peter the Great rushed back to port, warning that its condition was so deplorable that ”it could explode at any moment”. Vladimir Kuroyedov said he ordered the measure after a tour of the ship on Wednesday last week during naval exercises in the Barents Sea.

At least 15 people were killed and 17 more injured on Thursday in a café explosion in Siberia, which apparently was caused by a natural gas leak. Neglect of safety precautions has led to frequent gas explosions in Russian apartment buildings and public facilities.

It is enough to make Lenin turn in his mausoleum, where he lies only metres away across Red Square. A Moscow businessman has bought a large stake in GUM, the legendary Soviet-era retail store in Red Square opposite the Kremlin, and plans to turn the symbol of Communist Party privileges into a supermarket.

Russian President Vladimir Putin vowed on Monday to bring to justice those responsible for a weekend water park tragedy that killed at least 28 people as rescuers called off their search in the freezing snow. Putin demanded that ”the guilty be punished” after the water park’s glass roof collapsed on Saturday.

At least 24 people were reported killed and 106 injured when the glass and concrete roof covering a huge, two-year-old Moscow water park gave way in what the mayor called the city’s biggest technical accident. A child’s birthday party was being held in the pool area when the roof collapsed, said a Moscow police spokesperson.

The lone liberal challenger to President Vladimir Putin in March 14 elections said on Friday that a Moscow metro blast that killed at least 30 people was aimed at undermining the Russian leader’s credibility and highlighting his failure to ease tensions in separatist Chechnya.

A suspected suicide bomb attack in the Moscow subway killed at least 39 people and injured more than 120 early on Friday, five weeks before President Vladimir Putin stands for re-election. Witnesses spoke of carnage after a bomb ripped through a crowded subway car during morning rush hour.

A Mercedes sedan exploded outside the National Hotel across from Moscow’s Red Square on Tuesday, killing at least five people, Moscow police said. It was not clear whether the blast was due to a terrorist act or a business dispute that had turned violent, police said.

Thirty-two mainly Asian and African foreign students died on Monday in a fire that ripped through a university hostel in Moscow. Another 139 were hospitalised, of which 50 were in a critical condition, medical sources were quoted as saying by NTV television.

The embalmed body of Bolshevik leader Vladimir Lenin is in good enough condition to remain 100 years or more in the mausoleum on Moscow’s Red Square, experts said on Tuesday after a study. The embalmed body of Lenin was placed in a glass case in the tomb after his death in 1924.