U.S. President Barack Obama and Russian leader Vladimir Putin may discuss Syria on the sidelines of a regional summit in Bali next week, a top Kremlin official said Thursday.

Although Obama is yet to confirm his attendance at the October 7 Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation (APEC) meeting because of a budget crisis back home, Putin's foreign policy adviser said both Moscow and Washington were getting ready for the talks.

Dozens of angry protesters tried to storm Russia's embassy in Tripoli on Wednesday after reports that a Russian woman had killed a Libyan army officer, witnesses said.

The demonstrators destroyed a car parked in front of the embassy compound and damaged the mission's entrance gate, the witnesses told Agence France Presse.

Russian investigators on Wednesday formally charged two of 30 detained Greenpeace campaigners for piracy over an open-sea protest against Arctic oil drilling, an activist said.

"The first two activists have been charged with piracy," Mikhail Kreindlin, a representative of Greenpeace, told Agence France Presse. "These activists are from Brazil and Britain."

A patriotic Russian group on Tuesday called for President Vladimir Putin to be awarded the Nobel Peace Prize for his Syria diplomacy, claiming he was more deserving of the award than laureate U.S. President Barack Obama.

A group that lists senior Russian officials among its members announced at a news conference that it had written to the Nobel prize committee backing Putin for the prize awarded to Obama in 2009.

Russia said on Tuesday that Syrian President Bashar Assad could engage in peace talks with the more moderate elements of the armed opposition at a meeting in Geneva next month.

"I do not rule out that the armed opposition, if it does not stand for extremist or terrorist views, could very well be represented," Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov told reporters.

Greenpeace crew members detained in Russian jails for two months over their open-sea protest against Arctic oil drilling are "close to shock" over their conditions, a rights activist said Tuesday.

The 30 detained are being held in pre-trial detention centers in the cities of Murmansk and Apatity, which are nearly 2,000 kilometers (1,250 miles) north of Moscow and above the Arctic Circle.

Russia on Monday successfully launched a Proton-M rocket with a European communication satellite on board, marking a return of its most important unmanned space vehicle three months after one exploded on takeoff.

The launch from the Baikonur space center that Russia leases from the neighboring Central Asian nation of Kazakhstan had been originally scheduled for July 21.

A Russian court on Sunday ordered a Greenpeace spokesman to be detained for two months over an open-sea protest against Arctic oil drilling, in a criminal case that has caused international concern.

The court in the northern city of Murmansk on Thursday had already ordered the two-month detention of 22 Greenpeace activists pending the investigation into alleged piracy over a protest at a Gazprom oil rig on September 18.

U.N. Secretary General Ban Ki-moon announced Friday that long-sought peace talks aimed at bringing a political transition to Syria are tentatively planned for November.

"We are aiming for a conference in mid-November," Ban told reporters after the U.N. Security Council adopted a historic resolution to rein in Syria's chemical weapons.

Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov on Friday accused western nations of blaming Syria's President Bashar Assad of staging chemical weapons attacks without proof.

"The use of chemical weapons is inadmissible. This does not mean, however, that one can usurp the right to accuse and pass verdicts," Lavrov told the U.N. General Assembly.