Russia's legendary rifle-designer Mikhail Kalashnikov has been hospitalized in intensive care after complaining of general weakness, his assistant was quoted by news agencies as saying Tuesday.

The 93-year-old father of the AK-47 has been having heart problems and feeling poorly since March, when he stopped showing up for work, his aide told the RIA Novosti news agency.

Russian investigators on Tuesday accused two opposition lawmakers of fraud and asked for their parliamentary immunity to be removed, the latest move in a broad anti-corruption campaign.

The Investigative Committee -- which has led the Kremlin-backed anti-corruption drive -- said it had found evidence to implicate the two State Duma deputies in two separate fraud scams.

A bitter cold spell in Russia has claimed 123 lives in the past 10 days, an official said Tuesday, with the unseasonably early freeze testing authorities in a country used to notoriously tough winters.

Temperatures have plunged to up to minus 30 degrees Celsius (minus 34 degrees Farenheit) in the Moscow region and up to minus 60 degrees Celsius (minus 51 degrees Farenheit) in Eastern Siberia.

A high-ranking Russian ruling party member who headed a college in the restive North Caucasus region of Kabardino-Balkaria was shot dead Tuesday in his office, officials said.

Two unidentified gunmen entered the office of Boris Zherukov, head of a local agricultural college, at about 11 a.m. (07:00 GMT) and shot him twice in the head, the Investigative Committee said in a statement.

The mausoleum for Russia's revolutionary leader Vladimir Lenin must undergo major repair work after its foundation suffered water damage, the Kremlin said Monday.

The communist icon's body will also undergo preservation work, a move that adds fuel to a debate in Russia about whether his remains should be buried.

Russia said Monday it expected "common sense" to prevail in a burgeoning diplomatic row with Washington that could result in tit-for-tat travel restrictions between the two Cold War rivals.

"I would like to believe that common sense will prevail," Russian news agencies quoted Deputy Foreign Minister Sergei Ryabkov as saying.

Visiting Russian President Vladimir Putin, seeking to tighten defense ties with India and double trade within three years, met Prime Minister Manmohan Singh for talks on Monday.

Accompanied by several senior ministers and military officials, Putin was making a one-day trip to India, a traditional Russian ally which he had not visited since resuming the presidency in May.

Russia said on Monday it would be "political suicide" for the government of Syrian President Bashar Assad if it used chemical weapons against the armed opposition.

Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov said in an interview released by the English-language state television channel RT that Assad had given Moscow repeated assurances he had no plans to order such an attack.

Russia on Saturday urged South Sudan to punish those responsible for shooting down a U.N. helicopter, killing all four Russian crew members on board.

"We call on the government of South Sudan to carry out the necessary investigation, punish the guilty and take every measure to guarantee that this never happens again," the foreign ministry said in a statement on its website after Friday's incident.

Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov said on Saturday he believed Western powers had no desire to intervene in the Syrian conflict.

"I have a feeling that no one has any appetite for external intervention," Lavrov told journalists traveling with him on a flight to Moscow from an EU-Russia summit in Brussels, quoted by the ITAR-TASS news agency.