Sending the Bears out past the DEW line has been their traditional way of saying, "Hi, we're still here."

The Russian military has successfully tested what it described as the world's most powerful non-nuclear air-delivered bomb, Russia's state television reported Tuesday.

Channel One television said the new weapon, nicknamed the "dad of all bombs" is four times more powerful than the U.S. "mother of all bombs."

"The tests have shown that the new air-delivered ordnance is comparable to a nuclear weapon in its efficiency and capability," said Col.-Gen. Alexander Rukshin, a deputy chief of the Russian military's General Staff, said in televised remarks.

Unlike a nuclear weapon, the bomb doesn't hurt the environment, he added.

Unlike a nuclear weapon, the bomb doesn't hurt the environment, he added.

MOSCOW, Oct. 13 "” Balloting for Parliament will be held across Russia in December, and this much is already clear: Vladimir A. Ryzhkov, who was first elected in the turbulent yet hopeful days after the Soviet Union's fall and then blossomed into a fervent advocate for democracy, will lose.

So will Viktor V. Pokhmelkin, who used his seat to crusade against corruption in the police and other law enforcement agencies. Swept away, too, will be Anatoly A. Yermolin, a K.G.B. officer turned liberal stalwart who has been a lone voice in rebellion against President Vladimir V. Putin's expansive power.

Nearly eight years after Mr. Putin took office and began tightening his control over all aspects of the Russian government, he will almost certainly with this election succeed in extinguishing the last embers of opposition in Parliament.

Strict new election rules adopted under Mr. Putin, combined with the Kremlin's dominance over the news media and government agencies, are expected to propel the party that he created, United Russia, to a parliamentary majority even more overwhelming than its current one.

The system is so arrayed against all other parties that even some Putin allies have acknowledged that it harks back to the politics of the old days. Sergei M. Mironov, a staunch Putin supporter and the chairman of the upper house of Parliament, suggested recently that United Russia seemed to have been modeled on a certain forerunner.

"I think that the television broadcasts from the United Russia convention reminded a lot of people of long-forgotten pictures from the era of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union," said Mr. Mironov, leader of another pro-Putin party, Just Russia.

Mr. Putin's second presidential term expires next year, and under the Russian Constitution, he cannot run for a third consecutive term. At the lavishly choreographed convention of United Russia this month, he indicated that he would transfer his power base to the party and the Parliament and could become prime minister next year. The announcement raised the stakes for the December election.

The president currently appoints and wields far more power than the prime minister, but that could change should Mr. Putin become prime minister. Some analysts are speculating that Mr. Putin may try to create a parliamentary system with a strong prime minister and the president as a largely ceremonial post, akin to the arrangement in countries like Italy or Israel.

Mr. Putin has high approval ratings, and whatever the political climate, Russians today have far more economic and social freedoms than existed under Communism. Many people would like Mr. Putin to remain president, giving him credit for the strong economy and stability of recent years. Still, it appears that he is leaving little to chance in the parliamentary races.

"This is the first time in post-Soviet history when only the Kremlin decides who can participate and who can't," Mr. Ryzhkov said. "The Kremlin decides which party can exist and which party cannot. For the first time in post-Soviet history, a wide specter of political forces cannot participate in this election. I call it selection before election."

Mr. Ryzhkov's party, the Republican Party, one of the oldest in post-Soviet Russia, was disbanded by the government this year after it was accused of not having enough support under the new rules. Mr. Ryzhkov said his party easily met the standard but said officials ignored the evidence in a sham proceeding.

First chosen in 1993, soon after the collapse of the Soviet Union, the Russian Parliament in its early years was a raucous center of power that often challenged the president at the time, Boris N. Yeltsin. In Mr. Putin's first term, it sometimes retained that role, but Mr. Putin has steadily reined it in, and these days, it is considered little more than a sidekick of the Kremlin.

Mr. Putin has said that the tougher election rules are in part intended to eliminate the fractious politics that he asserts are caused by a proliferation of small parties. In recent months, he has contended that he is a champion of multiparty democracy, though he has also said that the system needs time to develop.

"We cannot build Russia's future by tying its many millions of citizens to just one person or group of people," he said last month. "We will not be able to build anything lasting unless we put in place a real and effectively functioning multiparty system and develop a civil society that will protect society and the state from mistakes and wrong actions on the part of those in power."

MOSCOW, Oct. 12 "” President Vladimir V. Putin of Russia sharply upbraided the visiting American secretaries of state and defense on Friday as highly anticipated negotiations produced no specific accords to resolve growing disagreements over missile defense and other security issues.

Mr. Putin followed a pattern of recent criticisms of American policy, whether speaking in Moscow, Munich or even Maine, and he shaped the initial public tone on Friday when he greeted Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice and Defense Secretary Robert M. Gates at his residence outside Moscow with a derisive lecture in front of the television cameras.

Mr. Putin dismissed with sarcasm the American plan to build components of a missile defense system in formerly Communist nations of Central Europe as a reaction to a threat that had not yet materialized.

"Of course, we can some time in the future decide that some antimissile defense should be established somewhere on the moon," Mr. Putin said, "but before we reach such an arrangement we will lose an opportunity of fixing some particular arrangements between us."

However, American officials said things had been different behind the scenes, a view not completely contradicted by Russian negotiators.

Russia's foreign minister, Sergey V. Lavrov, concluded the negotiations by describing new proposals from the Americans as constructive if still insufficient.

The American and Russian ministers of foreign affairs and defense agreed to have experts analyze the fresh American offerings debated Friday and to meet again in six months.

American officials said that while the Russians may have showed hostility in public, their approach during closed-door sessions was far more constructive.

"What you saw playing out before the cameras did not reflect the substance and the progress of the private meetings that followed," said Geoff Morrell, the Pentagon press secretary.

The new American proposals presented by Ms. Rice and Mr. Gates included an invitation for Russia to join the United States and NATO as a full partner in designing and operating an antimissile system guarding all of Europe.

The offer even could include invitations for Russian and American officers to inspect and even be stationed as liaison officers at each other's missile defense sites.

This concept of a new "Joint Regional Missile Defense Architecture" was described by senior administration officials as the most advanced and elaborate proposal on missile defense cooperation between Washington and Moscow.

"We remain eager to be full and open partners with Russia on missile defense," Mr. Gates said.

Acknowledging that the two sides differed sharply on how to preserve the best aspects of treaties reducing nuclear warheads and guaranteeing verification, the American secretaries also proposed that issues involving missile defense, conventional forces and nuclear arms be treated as "a strategic framework," to be discussed in an organized, parallel manner.

Mr. Lavrov, however, called for the United States to freeze its plans for developing missile defense bases in Poland and the Czech Republic while discussions continue on a compromise.

But Ms. Rice made it clear that the Bush administration would not halt its efforts in those two countries. The United States, Ms. Rice said, "is engaged in discussions, negotiations, with our allies, and those will continue."

Although the sides agreed that their ministers of foreign affairs and defense would meet again in six months, the talks did little to dispel Russian concerns over American intentions on missile defense, or to persuade the Kremlin to cancel its threat to suspend compliance with a treaty covering the array of conventional forces in Europe.

Mr. Putin often veers from the diplomatic language typical of such high-level meetings. On Friday, meeting with the Americans at his residence in Novo-Ogaryovo, outside of Moscow, the outwardly warm interactions that once marked relations, at least between the countries' two leaders, had clearly chilled in public.

Mr. Putin seemed to catch Mr. Gates and Ms. Rice off guard with his remarks, since no public statements were planned in advance.

Mr. Putin, though, arrived with notes and spent eight minutes welcoming the opportunity to talk about where Russia strongly disagreed with the Bush administration.

His remarks seemed to anger Ms. Rice, though Mr. Gates reacted impassively.

Mr. Putin kept the Americans waiting 40 minutes before he appeared. But Mr. Putin hardly rushed his guests away, as the private meeting went far longer than scheduled.

In addition to Mr. Putin's remarks on missile defense, he suggested that Russia would withdraw from the Intermediate Nuclear Forces Treaty, which barred short- and medium-range missiles from Europe, unless it were renegotiated and expanded to include other countries.

Mr. Putin also suggested that the Bush administration was pressing ahead with its security plans in Eastern Europe at the expense of relations with Russia.

"We hope that in the process of such complex and multifaceted talks," Mr. Putin said, referring to the format of the meetings on Friday, "you will not be forcing forward your relations with the Eastern European countries."

A senior American official summarized the day's efforts by saying the long-term goal of talks with the Russians remains "to create a virtuous cycle of cooperation."

The two sides agreed to discuss a method for jointly monitoring and assessing the ballistic missile threat "” taken to mean Iran "” and to use that information to guide plans for antimissile systems in Europe that would benefit Russia, the United States and NATO.

Mr. Gates described American plans to place 10 antimissile interceptors in Poland and an advanced targeting radar in the Czech Republic as no threat to Moscow's nuclear missiles.

"I would just like to emphasize that the missile defense system proposed for Central Europe is not aimed at Russia," Mr. Gates said. "It would have no impact on Russia's strategic deterrent."

Mr. Lavrov, the Russian foreign minister, insisted however that the American missile defense bases in Poland and the Czech Republic were "a potential threat for us." He threatened that if the two bases were completed, "We will have to take some measures to neutralize this threat."

He did not elaborate, but Russian military officials have warned they would consider reorienting their missiles' targets to Europe if American missile defense bases were installed in Poland and the Czech Republic.

SwampYankee wrote:

I wonder what Putin thinks of them.

It`s being speculated that Kremlin finances and has lots of indirect influence on those groups. Which would make sense- that would allow government to keep a close eye on groups of troublesome subjects while preserving a kind of "steam-letting" valve for them. These guys are not threatening Kremlin plus they occasionally may do a dirty job when it needs to be done.
There certainly is something to those speculations, those Russian skinheads often come to Latvia and, ironically, make violent protests about Latvian government opressing minorities - russians. Couple of years ago, on November 18th (that`s our equivalent of July 4th) one such neo-nazi "tourist" locked himself up in belltower of one of the oldest churches in our capital, threatening to blow it up with handgrenade. He was quite prominent figure in Russia`s neo-nazi movement.