More than 5,000 Russian emergency workers are battling to put out wildfires raging across forestland in Siberia, officials said Tuesday.

Over 1,250 square kilometers of woodland are ablaze in at least six eastern regions, Russia's federal forestry agency said.

Iran's Foreign Minister Mohammad Javad Zarif began a two-day visit to Lebanon on Tuesday by meeting Prime Minister Tammam Salam.

“We discussed cooperation between the two countries and bilateral ties,” said Zarif after the Grand Serail talks.

A Russian opposition coalition co-led by leading Kremlin critic Alexei Navalny has had nearly all its candidates barred from September regional and local elections, a representative told AFP on Monday. 

"We have been excluded from all the polls that we wanted to take part in," said Sergei Davidis of the RPR-Parnas opposition coalition, which includes the party of slain Kremlin critic Boris Nemtsov.

Ukraine on Monday reported it had repelled a rare tank assault by pro-Russian rebels that threatened to shatter a shaky ceasefire and dangerously escalate the 16-month war in its breakaway east.

President Petro Poroshenko said "about 200 insurgents" had staged a pre-dawn raid on Novolaspa -- a village halfway between the separatists' de facto capital Donetsk and the Kiev-held southern port of Mariupol -- that caught government soldiers off-guard.

Rescuers recovered eight bodies from a reservoir outside Moscow on Sunday following the collision of a helicopter and a seaplane in midair, with one other person missing and believed also killed in the crash. 

"We confirm that so far the bodies of eight dead have been found," the deputy governor of the Moscow region told the Interfax news agency.

Russian investigators said on Saturday they had found the wreckage of a helicopter that crashed last October with 14 people on board in a remote mountainous region of Siberia.

Rescuers "confirmed information that the Mi-8 helicopter of TuvaAvia airline that went missing on October 10 was found in an isolated mountainous area," investigators said in a statement.

Saudi Foreign Minister Adel al-Jubeir will visit Moscow on Tuesday to discuss Syria conflict and the Islamic State group with his Russian counterpart Sergei Lavrov, the Russian foreign ministry said Saturday.

The two ministers last met in Qatar on August 3 when Lavrov, Jubeir and U.S. Secretary of State John Kerry held a three-way meeting, with the situation in Syria topping the agenda.

The United States is further damaging its relations with Moscow by adding a Russian offshore oil and gas field to its sanctions imposed over Ukraine, a Kremlin spokesman said Friday.

"The trend to continue a dialogue in the language of sanctions is further destroying our bilateral relations, unfortunately," President Vladimir Putin's spokesman Dmitry Peskov said, quoted by TASS news agency.

U.S. President Barack Obama believes Bashar Assad's backers in Moscow and Tehran may see the writing is on the wall for the Syrian regime, offering rare hope for a resolution to a bloody civil war.

Speaking to columnists in the White House on Wednesday to sell his nuclear deal with Iran, Obama also offered a glimmer of optimism about the dire situation in Syria.

The EU on Friday formally extended until next year a multi-million-euro aid package to help European fruit and vegetable growers hit by Russian sanctions over the Ukraine crisis.

The European Commission, the executive arm of the 28-nation European Union, said it "extended until the end of June 2016 the safety net measures for the European fruit and vegetables sector."