- His ministry will start probes into deposits developed by French oil major Total and the Russian-British joint venture TNK-BP
- His ministry will halt the Sakhalin-II energy project if no environmental guarantees are provided over a controversial pipeline
* Mohammad Saeedi, the deputy head of Iran's Atomic Energy Organization said:
- Russian nuclear chief Sergei Kiriyenko will visit Iran in December
- Iran's top nuclear negotiator and the EU foreign policy chief will not discuss Tehran's moratorium on uranium enrichment
* Russia and Iran signed a supplementary agreement for the delivery of 80 metric tons of nuclear fuel to a nuclear power plant in southern Iran in March 2007, the head of Russia's nuclear exporter said
* The Federation Council, the upper chamber of Russia's parliament, approved sending combat engineers to Lebanon
* Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov said:
- Russia is opposed to any ultimatums in settling the Iran and Middle East situations
- New flexible alliances are needed to resolve international problems more efficiently, unlike the alignments of the Cold War era, which are no longer capable of responding to changing realities
* A Russian court martial sentenced Alexander Sivyakov, the main defendant in the Andrei Sychyov hazing case, to four years in prison
* Russia's upper chamber of parliament ordered its committees to examine the situation around the massive Sakhalin II energy project, off the country's Pacific coast
* Russia's Foreign Ministry criticized a Georgian idea to invite foreign diplomats to visit a troubled region separating Tbilisi-controlled territory from breakaway Abkhazia as dangerous and untimely
* The Khrunichev State Research and Production Space Center, one of Russia's leading space-industry firms, said it has won a tender to build its second satellite for Kazakhstan, KazSat-2
* A Kyrgyz passenger airliner crashed on take-off into a U.S. combat aircraft in the Central Asian state's international airport Tuesday, a source at the airport said
* Iran's top nuclear negotiator Ali Larijani and European Union's foreign policy chief Javier Solana will meet September 27 in a European city, said Gholamreza Aghazadeh, Iran's nuclear chief and vice president
