Seventy years after the Nazis encircled Leningrad, the diary of a teenage girl chronicling the World War II siege has been published, sparking comparison with Anne Frank.

In May 1941, Leningrad teenager Lena Mukhina started writing a diary, pouring out her hopes and fears, her crush on a classmate called Vladimir and worries about bad marks.

For years, Moscow's historic Gorky Park, the spooky location of U.S. writer Martin Cruz Smith's thriller, was a tacky, neglected space with ancient rollercoasters, vodka and candy floss.

Now visitors lounge on beanbags, attend mass yoga classes and access free wifi on their laptops.

A drunk Russian man was detained by police in Moscow on Monday as he tried to scale the walls of the Kremlin during city day celebrations, a police spokeswoman told Agence France Presse.

The man was detained at around 1 am in the Alexandrovsky Sad park around the Kremlin after he was spotting trying to climb the walls of the tightly guarded fortress, which houses the offices of the Russian president.

Russia disapproves of the European Union oil embargo imposed on Syria, Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov said Saturday, the Interfax news agency reported.

"We have always said that unilateral sanctions will do no good. This destroys a partnership approach to any crisis," Lavrov was quoted as telling journalists at a regional summit in Dushanbe.

Sleepy early morning passengers on a flight from Moscow's biggest airport to London may have thought they were dreaming Friday when a drunken Russian woman staged erotic dances on the plane.

But crew on the 7:00 am flight from Domodedovo airport to London decided to return to Moscow as the woman, 39, a native of the Russian region of Tatarstan, was deemed to be causing an inconvenience to passengers, the RIA Novosti news agency said.

The mayor of a Russian town just outside Moscow was shot dead Monday in a possible contract killing, investigators said.

Yevgeny Dushko, mayor of Sergiyev Posad, a town of 105,000 people some 60 kilometers north of the capital, was leaving his apartment building at 7:30 am (03:30 GMT) when an unidentified gunman shot him twice, the Investigative Committee said.

Boris Yeltsin never suspected how a precursor to the Internet helped him foil the August 1991 coup and bring down the USSR until he bumped into a blinking computer and noticed something called e-mail.

A quick presentation by a starry-eyed woman who worked on the Soviet Union's maiden computer communications program left Russia's first president stunned.

Russian security services have foiled a plot by a group of Islamists to blow up a high-speed train running between Moscow and Saint Petersburg, the Kommersant business daily said Monday.

A blast on the same route that authorities blamed on Muslim rebels killed 26 people in November 2009.

Russian authorities fired a prison governor Tuesday after scandalous photographs revealed prisoners holding a toga party with caviar and even taking a delivery of McDonald's takeaway.

The governor of Prison Number 3 in the town of Serpukhov outside Moscow and two of his deputies were fired after an investigation found "blatant breaches" at the jail, the prosecutor-general's office said Tuesday.

Two young women stripped down to bikinis in central Moscow on Thursday to express support for Russian President Dmitry Medvedev, in the latest exposure of bare flesh ahead of 2012 polls.

Prime Minister Vladimir Putin has already inspired an apparently rival group of women to similar acts of naked daring but this was the first time the incumbent Russian president has prompted an erotic frisson.