The Russian government said on Monday that it will send two planes to Lebanon to evacuate Russian citizen from war-torn Syria, the first such effort since the uprising against Syrian President Bashar Assad began in March 2011.

The Emergency Situations Ministry said two of its planes will fly to Beirut on Tuesday to carry more than 100 Russians from Syria.

French Foreign Minister Laurent Fabius said Sunday that Russia had offered to help transport French troops and supplies to Mali and that Canada was to help to bring African troops to the country.

Asked on Europe 1 radio about how African troops would be transported, Fabius said "there is transportation that will be partly by the Africans themselves, partly by the Europeans and partly by the Canadians."

President Michel Suleiman traveled to Moscow on Saturday for talks with his Russian counterpart and to receive an award on his role in calling for dialogue and opening channels of communication between bickering parties.

Suleiman's three-day visit at the head of a delegation that includes deputy Prime Minister Samir Moqbel comes following an official invitation sent by Russian Orthodox Patriarch Kirill I.

Progressive Socialist Party leader Walid Jumblat announced on Friday that Russia has promised to provide financial and political aid to resolve the crisis of refugees escaping the violence in Syria to Lebanon.

In remarks to LBCI TV following talks with Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov, Jumblat said: “Moscow will make a financial and political contribution to resolve the crisis of Syrian refugees in Lebanon.”

Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov on Thursday hit out at the United States for "blasphemous" accusations blaming this week's blasts in the city of Aleppo on the Syrian regime.

"Yesterday I saw a semi-neutral report on CNN that it was not ruled out that this terrorist act had been staged by the government forces themselves," Lavrov said in the Tajik capital Dushanbe.

Russia is planning a major drive to improve its image abroad by opening more cultural centers, promoting the learning of Russian and encouraging visits by young people, a report said Wednesday.

The Kommersant daily said the plan -- worked out by the government and state cooperation body Rossotrudnichestvo -- was in line with the Kremlin’s desire to use "soft power" to preserve Russian influence abroad.

Russia said Tuesday it would be "counterproductive" to refer war crimes committed in the Syria conflict to the International Criminal Court as proposed by dozens of states led by Switzerland.

"We view this initiative as untimely and counterproductive to solving today's main goal -- an immediate end to the bloodshed in Syria," the foreign ministry said in a statement.

Russia's struggling space agency has unveiled a new multi-billion-dollar plan that will see the development of a replacement for the ageing Soyuz rocket by 2020.

The $70-billion plan published over the weekend on the website of the Russian Space Agency (Roscosmos) also envisions the launch of new unmanned missions to the Moon and beyond.

Russia said Sunday that removing Syrian President Bashar Assad from power was not part of past international agreements on the crisis and was impossible to implement, as violence across the country killed at least 100 people according to a rights group.

"This is a precondition that is not contained in the Geneva communique (agreed by world powers in June) and which is impossible to implement because it does not depend on anyone," news agencies quoted Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov as saying.

Russia called on Saturday for a political transition in Syria, as Switzerland prepared to petition the International Criminal Court to open a case on war crimes in the country.

Violence raged unabated with regime warplanes carrying air strike near the capital, a car bomb explosion in Damascus province and the murder of an athletics champion shot dead by gunmen, said the Syrian Observatory for Human Rights.