President Dmitry Medvedev

Stung by another terrorist attack in Russia's capital, President Dmitry Medvedev on Tuesday ordered security services to step up efforts to dismantle extremist networks and sharply criticized the management of Moscow's biggest airport. A day after a suicide bombing killed 35 people waiting for international passengers arriving at Domodedovo Airport, there still was no claim of responsibility. But suspicion fell on Islamic militant groups from the Caucasus region who have been blamed for previous attacks, and Russian officials said they were searching for three Chechen men. In televised comments to the leadership of the Federal Security Service, a successor agency to the KGB, Medvedev singled out officials at the airport, which has been remodeled and expanded in the last decade.

MOSCOW - President-elect Vladimir Putin said Tuesday that he would resign as chairman of the United Russia party after his inauguration in early May and indicated that outgoing President Dmitry Medvedev should serve as both prime minister and leader of the party. Medvedev stepped down after one term as president to allow Putin, who was serving as prime minister, to again seek the presidency, which he held for two terms before Medvedev's tenure. Putin was elected last month after a lengthy series of demonstrations in which tens of thousands of opponents took to the streets to demand an end to Putin's rule and to call United Russia "the party of swindlers and thieves.

From the smoke of the wildfires engulfing the Moscow region and the embarrassment of this summer's spy scandal, Vladimir Putin is reemerging as Russia's most powerful man and, experts say, a candidate to reclaim the presidency a little more than a year and a half from now. For more than two years since term limits forced him to give up office and take the prime minister's job instead, Putin and his protege, President Dmitry Medvedev, have seemed...

  Mikhail Gorbachev, who presided over the breakup of the Soviet Union in 1991, was marginalized as a political leader as Russians found it hard to forgive him for the economic deprivations that followed. Now, against the backdrop of growing protests against Russian leader Vladimir Putin, Gorbachev has emerged as a vocal critic of the government, and his popularity among the opposition is on the rise. Gorbachev, 81, spoke to The Times in Moscow this week. Do you think the past presidential election in Russia was fair?

Russia buried Soviet-era dissident and author Alexander Solzhenitsyn at the 16th-century Donskoi monastery after a service attended by President Dmitry Medvedev that bore all the hallmarks of a state funeral. Hundreds of elderly Russians came to bid farewell to the deeply religious Nobel prize laureate in the Russian Orthodox ceremony in Moscow.

Rows of missiles and tanks rumbled through Moscow's Red Square and dozens of combat jets streaked overhead during the Victory Day parade in the largest display of military might since the Soviet times. President Dmitry Medvedev warned that Russia was ready to respond to any challenge. The show included about 9,000 goose-stepping troops and more than 100 combat vehicles.

Parliament's upper house unanimously approved extending Russian presidential terms, a constitutional amendment that has fueled speculation Prime Minister Vladimir Putin will return as head of state. The Federation Council endorsed a six-year term for future presidents, up from four. President Dmitry Medvedev, who proposed the changes, will sign the bill into law. Putin, president for eight years until May, has said he favors the change.

Russia's lower house of parliament, the State Duma, voted overwhelmingly to lengthen the presidential term from four years to six, an action that opponents called a step toward Prime Minister Vladimir Putin returning to the office. The constitutional amendment faces two more votes but appears certain to be enacted. Political analysts and Kremlin foes predict that President Dmitry Medvedev could step down as early as next year, making Putin the acting president and triggering elections in which Putin would run and probably win.

Russian officials say a submarine-launched ballistic missile has made a record flight, hitting a target in the middle of the Pacific Ocean for the first time. President Dmitry Medvedev witnessed the test, part of naval exercises being staged in the northern Barents Sea. Russian TV showed what it said was the Sineva missile launching from the submarine Tula. Medvedev said it flew more than 7,100 miles to the Pacific near the equator. Medvedev also was quoted by Russian news agencies as ordering naval officials to build new aircraft carriers.

The FBI rolled up a Russian spy ring in suburban America just days after President Dmitry Medvedev tooled around Silicon Valley, netting an iPhone 4 from Apple's Steve Jobs and a promised $1-billion investment from Cisco Systems. The leader of the United States' Cold War foe then chowed down on cheeseburgers with President Obama in Arlington, Va., at a diner blocks from the apartment of one of the alleged secret agents. Agents, by the way, who apparently never sent home any secrets. John LeCarre might have discarded this story as beggaring belief, but it's a true-life collision of past and present relations with Moscow.

When Russian leader Vladimir Putin climbed into the martial arts ring in the Olimpiysky Palace in downtown Moscow recently to congratulate a Russian wrestler who had quite convincingly beaten his American opponent, he was greeted by an unfamiliar sound. The crowd, which, given the high ticket price, consisted mostly of wealthy and middle-class Russians, booed, with some shouting, "Go away!" The prime minister's press service later hurried to explain that it was a misunderstanding and that the audience last month was booing not Putin but American fighter Jeff Monson, who was being led away from the hall at the same time.

Russia's strongman Re "Putin's back, unfortunately," Editorial, Sept. 28 Vladimir Putin's right to run for a third term as president of Russia is highly questionable. Such an idea would have never visited Bill Clinton, since the 22nd Amendment to the U.S. Constitution says: "No person shall be elected to the office of the president more than twice. " When a group of legal scholars was preparing a draft of the Russian Constitution adopted in 1993, they were looking at the 22nd Amendment as an example.

By positioning himself to regain the presidency next year and perhaps hold the job well into the next decade, analysts say, Vladimir Putin is placing himself above what many Russians expect to be a dirty campaign for parliament this fall and tough economic reforms to follow. His protege, current President Dmitry Medvedev, not so much. Their announcement at a congress of the ruling United Russia party that the two leaders would switch positions allows Putin to protect his image as a populist and a strong leader.

Respected Russian Finance Minister Alexei Kudrin said he will resign if current President Dmitry Medvedev is named prime minister next year under a new Vladimir Putin presidency. On Saturday, Prime Minister Putin said he will run for president in the spring and would select Medvedev as his prime minister if elected. Kudrin, who is one of the most trusted Russian politicians among foreign investors, said Sunday that he has fundamental economic disagreements with Medvedev. "I do not see myself in the new government.

Reclusive North Korean leader Kim Jong Il met with Russian President Dmitry Medvedev in remote eastern Siberia on Wednesday, reportedly to discuss such issues as a natural gas pipeline, economic aid and nuclear disarmament. Kim, on his first trip to Russia in nearly a decade, is desperate for economic aid for his starving country, and Medvedev is seeking to bolster Russia's economic involvement in Northeast Asia. Moscow wants to build a pipeline through the Korean peninsula to sell Siberian natural gas to North Korea, Japan and South Korea.

Reclusive North Korean leader Kim Jong Il traveled to Russia for the first time in nearly a decade, holding rare talks Wednesday with President Dmitry Medvedev that made progress on such issues as an energy deal and nuclear disarmament, according to Russian media reports. Meeting in remote eastern Siberia, the two leaders brought varying agendas, experts say: Kim is desperate for economic aid for his starving country while Medvedev seeks to bolster Russia's role in northeast Asia and promote its rapidly expanding economy.

A staunch supporter of Prime Minister Vladimir Putin has been nominated to the post of mayor of Moscow by President Dmitry Medvedev, who fired the previous mayor in a public spat that experts thought exposed a power struggle between the two top Kremlin leaders. Deputy Premier Sergei Sobyanin, 42, was selected to replace Yuri Luzhkov, who was fired by Medvedev late last month from the job he had held since 1992. Political observers had thought the ouster might have been an initial battleground in a potential presidential race between Medvedev and Putin in 2012.

The 2012 Russian presidential elections may be over already. Vladimir Putin's words and deeds of late have made it eminently clear that he's had enough of being prime minister and wants the No. 1 job back from President Dmitry Medvedev. And many experts believe it's his for the taking. Amid what political analysts have identified as a fierce power struggle between the two Russian leaders, the expulsion of a key Medvedev aide from the Kremlin is being interpreted as a sign that Putin has gained the upper hand.

The investigation of last month's suicide bombing at Moscow's Domodedovo airport in which 36 people were killed and dozens more injured has exposed growing tensions between Russian President Dmitry Medvedev and Prime Minister Vladimir Putin. During a Kremlin meeting Thursday with law enforcement officials in charge of the investigation, a visibly irritated Medvedev forcefully contradicted a statement by Putin a day earlier by saying that the case was not solved and that no government official should say anything to the contrary.