World Bank announces loans for Russia

The World Bank has announced that it will provide Russia with five-hundred-million dollars in loans this year.

The bank's director in Russia, Julian Schweitzer, and the Russian deputy prime minister, Valentina Matviyenko, said after a meeting in Moscow that one-hundred-and-fifty-million dollars of the total would go towards funding programmes to combat tuberculosis and AIDS.

The money will also be spent on transport and on helping Russians to move from impoverished regions in the far north.

From the newsroom of the BBC World Service