Russian President Vladimir Putin sat at a piano and picked out the melody of a popular Soviet-era song on Wednesday as a group of students sang along.

The strongman leader sat down at a grand piano at a top Moscow physics institute and played the song "Moscow Windows" while members of a male student choir joined in, the state RIA Novosti news agency reported.

Russia will not intervene in the raging anti-government protests in Ukraine and believes its leadership will find a way out, President Vladimir Putin's spokesman Dmitry Peskov said Thursday.

"We consider we do not have the right to intervene in any way in the internal affairs of our brother Ukraine. That's unacceptable and Russia has not done this and will not do it," Peskov said in an interview published on the website of Komsomolskaya Pravda daily.

Ukraine's former master Russia on Wednesday slammed "outside interference" in its neighbor's affairs and accused the radical opposition against President Viktor Yanukovych of crudely violating the constitution.

"Ukraine's legitimate authorities face outside interference in its internal affairs," Russian Deputy Foreign Minister Grigory Karasin told Interfax, referring to a number of statements from the United States and the European Union.

Russian prosecutors on Wednesday demanded harsh jail sentences of five to six years for eight protesters on trial for a rally in 2012 ahead of Vladimir Putin's inauguration.

Several participants in the protest on Moscow's Bolotnaya Square on May 6, 2012, have been on trial since last June, accused of "mass riots" and hitting police after the rally turned violent.

Efforts to broker a peace settlement for Syria will be neither simple nor quick, but a peace conference marks a historic opportunity, Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov said Wednesday.

"The negotiations will not be simple, they will not be quick," Lavrov said as the conference got under way in the Swiss lakeside town of Montreux.

Ukrainian police on Wednesday stormed protesters' barricades in Kiev amid violent clashes that left five activists dead, the first fatalities in two months of anti-government protests.

Pitched battles raged in the center of the Ukrainian capital as protesters hurled stones and Molotov cocktails at police and the security forces responded with tear gas, stun grenades and rubber bullets.

Edward Snowden has rejected suggestions he was a Russian spy, saying in remarks published Tuesday that he acted alone in exposing U.S. surveillance programs.

"This 'Russian spy' push is absurd," the U.S. fugitive told The New Yorker.

The first direct talks between the Syrian regime and the opposition, which start this week in Geneva, will last seven to 10 days and be followed by another round, a senior Russian official said on Tuesday.

"The first round of negotiations will last for seven to 10 days. There will then be a short break, and then the talks will resume," the Interfax news agency quoted a source in the Russian delegation to the talks as saying.

A Russian convicted of hate crimes has been arrested in Cuba and could soon be extradited to Moscow, a Russian diplomat in Havana told Agence France Presse Monday.

"Ultra-nationalist Russian Maxim Martsinkevich, wanted at the international level, was arrested January 17 in Cuba, and in the coming days a decision will be made about his extradition to Russia," the embassy official told AFP on condition of anonymity.

Edward Snowden may have acted in concert with a foreign power in exposing U.S. surveillance programs, two Republican lawmakers suggested Sunday.

"I think there are some interesting questions we have to answer that certainly would lend one to believe that the Russians had at least in some part something to do" with the affair, House Intelligence Committee chairman Mike Rogers told CBS's "Face the Nation."