Corey Flintoff

In Moscow, a dozen people are on trial in connection with a protest last year against Russian President Vladimir Putin. They're accused of attacking police and participating in mass riots after the demonstration turned violent. Critics charge that the trial is part of an intimidation campaign against dissidents.

Don't mess with Soviet history, especially when it comes to World War II. That's the message coming from some hard-line Russian legislators who are angry with an opposition lawmaker who criticized Josef Stalin's World War II counterintelligence agency, SMERSH, and likened it to Adolf Hitler's Gestapo.

U.N. Secretary General Ban Ki-moon met with Russian President Vladimir Putin on Friday, saying it is important not to "lose momentum" in the effort to convene a peace conference on Syria. Ban was only the latest in a string of foreign dignitaries who have come to Russia, seeking Putin's blessing for such a conference, expected to be held in early June. There's a lot at stake. Russia has been a long-time supporter of Syrian President Bashar al-Assad and continues to supply weapons to his regime. U.S. officials have said lately that those weapons include advanced missile systems for attacking ships and airplanes. If Assad already has such weapons, they could pose a real threat to international efforts to impose a no-fly zone, to deliver supplies to the rebels, or to maintain a maritime embargo.

The actor accepted Russian citizenship in January after he denounced a proposed new tax on the rich in his native France. The Chechen connection is likely to rile human rights groups that have accused the president of the Russian republic of gross human rights violations. Depardieu will appear opposite Elizabeth Hurley in the first of the films.

Suspected Boston Marathon bomber Tamerlan Tsarnaev traveled to Dagestan in southern Russia twice in recent years, and investigators want to know whether that experience led him toward a radical and violent form of Islam.

Much has been made of the fact that the suspects in the Boston bombings are ethnic Chechens, with links to the volatile North Caucasus region of Russia. Russian reaction to the story, however, appears to be as complex as the region's turbulent history.

The already-frayed relations between the U.S. and Russia have unraveled even more over the past several days. Russia has published a list of 18 Americans who will be barred from entering the country because of their alleged involvement in human rights violations.