Palestinian president Mahmoud Abbas told Russian leader Vladimir Putin on Thursday he hoped to establish peace talks with Israel later this year while admitting that the chances for progress were slim.

Abbas said during a visit to Moscow he hoped "that later this year, we will see the start of substantive negotiations with Israel".

France, Russia and the United States are trying to draw up a list of Syrian officials with whom the opposition can negotiate, French Foreign Minister Laurent Fabius said on Tuesday.

"We worked together on an idea... of a list of Syrian officials who would be acceptable to Syria's opposition National Coalition," he told the foreign affairs committee of the National Assembly.

Russia's emergencies ministry on Tuesday airlifted 103 Russians and citizens of former Soviet republics from Syria amid continuing violence in the strife-torn country, news reports said.

The Il-62 plane left from Latakia airport in western Syria where President Bashar Assad enjoys his strongest support at 1440 GMT, news agencies quoted a ministry spokeswoman as saying.

Around 10 tonnes of Russian food aid and blankets arrived Tuesday in Syria, where an uprising against the regime of Moscow ally prepared to enter its third year, state news agency SANA reported.

"A Russian plane landed at Bassel Assad airport in (the coastal province of) Latakia on Tuesday, carrying 10 tonnes of food aid and blankets," said SANA.

The maiden flight of India's first domestically developed long-range cruise missile was aborted midway on Tuesday after it veered off course, defense scientists said.

The two-stage Nirbhay missile blasted off from the eastern state of Orissa but the test flight was halted prematurely to "ensure coastal safety", the state-run Defense Research and Development Organization (DRDO) said.

A top Syrian opposition official met Russia's Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov on Monday in a bid to reverse Moscow's refusal to back calls on President Bashar Assad to step down.

Haytham Manna of the National Coordination Committee for Democratic Change -- Syria's second-largest anti-Assad group -- said he thought the road to peace in Syria ran through Moscow.

Russia on Tuesday marked 60 years since the death of Joseph Stalin with the nation divided about whether to view him as a tyrant who slaughtered millions or a savior who turned the country into a superpower after World War II.

Hundreds of people laid red carnations at the Red Square grave of the Soviet ruler, where his body was buried in 1961 after being displayed for several years alongside Lenin in the Mausoleum.

Syrian Deputy Foreign Minister Faisal al-Meqdad on Tuesday handed over to the Russian ambassador a German journalist, Billy Six, whose employers said had been out of contact for almost four months.

"The aim of the meeting is to hand over the German journalist to the Russian ambassador," Muqdad said at a press conference in Damascus.

The Vatican, Iran and other religious states are resisting efforts by a U.N. conference, which started Monday, to demand tougher global standards to prevent violence against women and children.

More than 6,000 non-government groups are registered at the annual U.N. Commission on the Status of Women, one of the biggest events held at the U.N. headquarters which regularly turns into a diplomatic battle.

Russia said on Friday that decisions made at a Friends of Syria meeting in Rome this week, which saw the United States pledge direct aid to Syrian rebels, encouraged "extremists" who want to seize power by force.

"The decisions made in Rome as well as the statements, both in letter and spirit, give direct encouragement to extremists to take power by force, despite the unavoidable suffering of ordinary Syrians," the foreign ministry said in a statement.