Dreamed up in the heady days of ever-rising oil prices, before the financial crisis struck, it represented the optimism and swagger of the new cash-rich Russia.

England's ill-fated bid to host the 2018 World Cup was yesterday described as "less Premier League, more League One" by the Englishman behind Qatar's surprise success in being awarded the 2022 finals.

There were no street parties in Moscow last night – it was minus 16 degrees after all. But motorists waved Russian tricolours as they drove along the city's main ring road, and Prime Minister Vladimir Putin immediately boarded a plane to Zurich to have discussions with Fifa and congratulate the Russian bid team. For the first time in the history of the tournament, the World Cup will be held in eastern Europe. "We got it! Russia will host the 2018 Fifa World Cup! Now we need to prepare for it. And I hope our team will do well too," wrote President Dmitry Medvedev on his Twitter feed after the vote was announced last night.

Russian Prime Minister Dmitry Medvedev has welcomed the news that the 2018 World Cup is coming to his country but immediately turned his focus to delivering the event.

Russia's president called on his citizens to go forth and multiply yesterday, promising bonuses for families who have three or more children.

She might have wanted to keep her head down, but instead the US Secretary of State, Hillary Clinton, yesterday landed in Astana, the capital of Kazakhstan, for a meeting of the Organisation for Security and Co-operation in Europe.

It will get personal very quickly for Hillary Clinton, the US Secretary of State. While all of Washington scrambled yesterday to contain the fallout from the leak of secret diplomatic cables, she will have some face-to-face explaining to do when she arrives at a European security summit in Kazakhstan tomorrow.

Leaders of the North Atlantic alliance will today conclude a two-day summit that was billed by the Nato secretary-general, Anders Fogh Rasmussen, as one of the most important in its history. Held in Lisbon, it has three main agenda items: agreement on a new Strategic Concept, the war in Afghanistan, and relations with Russia, including revised plans for a missile defence system. This disparate collection of priorities can be seen either as justification for Nato's continued existence or as proof that the alliance is out of time and has lost its way.

A year after the death of Sergei Magnitsky, a lawyer who claimed to have uncovered huge corruption in Russia's Interior Ministry, officials from the same ministry claimed this week that Mr Magnitsky himself was implicated in the fraud.

Russia's president has suggested that changes to the country's spy agency are coming in the wake of this summer's arrest of agents in the US and a report that a top Russian intelligence officer helped capture them.

Russia has identified the double agent who betrayed its US spy ring over the summer and has sent a contract killer to assassinate him, according to a newspaper report published yesterday.

A second reporter who wrote about a controversial road-building project outside Moscow has been badly beaten up. The assault came two days after another leading journalist was attacked, causing a national uproar.

The Russian authorities yesterday faced demands to prosecute the attackers of a journalist branded a "traitor" by a youth organisation linked to the country's ruling party.

Armed police officers swarmed into the Moscow headquarters today of a bank belonging to Russian media tycoon Alexander Lebedev, the owner of The Independent and the new i title, who watched helplessly as they rifled through company files, his spokesman and police said.