U.S. Secretary of State Condoleeza Rice and Defense Secretary Robert Gates got an earful when they visited Moscow on Friday. Russian President Vladimir Putin again blasted America's plan to base a missile defense system in eastern Europe--this time with the TV cameras rolling and the American officials in the background. “Of course, we can some time in the future decide that some antimissile defense should be established somewhere on the moon,” The New York Times quoted Mr. Putin as saying, “but before we reach such an arrangement we will lose an opportunity of fixing some particular arrangements between us.”

The BBC reported that the opposition coalition that has rallied around the former chess champion Gary Kasparov will not be able to run candidates in the December elections. The decision by Russia's election commission had been expected because the coalition, known as Other Russia, is not registered as a political party.

Spy vs. spy? The head of Russia's drug control agency took to the pages of the business daily Kommersant on Tuesday to warn that a turf battle now going on among Russia's secret services could weaken the government and undermine the nation's stability. (The piece seems to not be in the English edition of Kommersant, but you can find the International Herald Tribune's piece on the story here). Viktor Cherkesov's comments seemed to refer to the arrests in early October of several drug control officers--including a key Cherkesov aide--by Russia's equivalent of the FBI. Meanwhile the head of that agency, the Federal Security Service, said in an interview with Argumenty i Fakty, a Russian news weekly, that it has unmasked more than 300 foreign spies in the past four years. Nikolai Patrushev said that the U.S. and Britain had recruited spies from Poland, Georgia and other countries to spy in Russia.

And while Russia and the U.S. seem to not be getting along well on the ground, things are just fine in space. A new mission to the international space station blasted off from the Russian space command in Kazakhstan on Wednesday with an American woman, Peggy Whitson, as commander.

I'll end the week with a tale of billionaires behaving badly. Boris Berezovsky apparently has a legal beef with Roman Abramovich. The case, involving the oil company Sibneft, is being argued in London, where both Russians live. The world's 840th richest man was shopping in Dolce & Gabbana when his bodyguards told him that the world's 16th richest man was next door in Hermes. Berezovsky popped into the posh shop and served Abramovich with the writ. The whole tale was recounted with great glee in the British paper Daily Mail.