Russia wants the world to recognise a breakaway state, but it needs other nations (big or small) to lend support. Where in the world could it find allies?

Hundreds of miles of Europe's busiest waterway are frozen solid – and from Bavaria to Bulgaria, the continent's economy is seizing up too. Tony Paterson reports from Berlin

With record snowfalls, icy winds, and thousands of people trapped in remote villages, much of Central and Eastern Europe is in the grip of a cold snap that has caused more than 100 deaths. Temperatures in parts of Ukraine and other Eastern European countries are hovering around -30C (-22F).

Turkey has given it the go-ahead for the construction of a gas pipeline under the Black Sea, Russia's energy giant Gazprom said.

From Siberia and the Middle East to China, Rory Smith follows the trail of vast fortunes

Winter sports

BP was left out in the cold yesterday after its US rival ExxonMobil struck an agreement to explore Russia's oil-rich Arctic continental shelf with Rosneft, moving in just months after the collapse of a similar pact between the state energy giant and the UK group.

Paddy Leigh Fermor (obituary, 11 June) was a man of many dimensions, writes Patrick Reade. He had an unquenchable curiosity about people and culture; when he met remote groups, be they Saxons in Transylvania, Vlachs in northern Greece or gypsies in Hungary, he would not just learn their language and song but remember it for the rest of his life. At Paddy's last birthday party in London, William Blacker quoted two lines of a Romanian ballad in a speech about him; at the age of 96 Paddy sang the song in its entirety. There seemed no occasion at which he could not enliven the party by an adroit performance, or reminisce in half a dozen European languages.

The private plane of Todor Zhivkov, the late Bulgarian communist ruler, was submerged in the Black Sea waters near the city of Varna this week to attract scuba divers and tourists to the sunny coasts of north-eastern Bulgaria.

It is a taunt that anyone who has ever studied classical languages will have heard: What's the point? Where are you going to speak Latin or ancient Greek? Well that argument loses a little of its force with the identification of a small community in northern Turkey that converses in a Greek dialect that seems intriguingly similar to the language of Pericles, Plato and Socrates.

An isolated community near the Black Sea coast in a remote part of north-eastern Turkey has been found to speak a Greek dialect that is remarkably close to the extinct language of ancient Greece.

At least 12 people were killed by landslides after torrential rain swept northern Turkey.

He has become the outspoken voice of the Liberal Democrat left – yesterday calling for the party's MPs to be given the power of veto over contentious Coalition policy proposals.