TODAY: Opposition called for questioning in Navalny case; Putin says Church should have more control; Stalingrad celebrations; Kremlin’s rights council blames police for May violence; St Petersburg hospital protest; Biden comments on U.S.-Russia differences; Lavrov meets Syrian opposition leader; Lebedev’s airline loses license; Filin says he knows his attacker.

Prominent opposition figures including Nikita Belykh and Boris Nemtsov are being summoned by the Investigative Committee for questioning in the embezzlement case linked to Alexei Navalny.  Patriarch Kirill says he backs the idea of criminal prosecution for blasphemy.  President Vladimir Putin says that the Orthodox Church should have more influence over Russian life.  Putin joined in with this weekend’s controversial commemoration of Stalingrad, praising it as ‘a symbol of the unity and invincibility of our people’.  Members of the Kremlin’s human rights council believe that police, not activists, instigated violence at last May’s opposition protests, saying that the qualification of the protest as a ‘mass riot […] does not reflect the reality of what happened’.  11 activists are in pretrial detention for taking part in the protests, and the Investigative Committee, dismissing the human rights watchdog’s claims, says all the arrests are ‘justified’.  A reported 800 people gathered in St. Petersburg yesterday to protest the possible closure of a children’s cancer treatment center.  ‘St. Petersburg is renowned as the European capital of homophobia’, says Viktor Davidoff.  A group of U.N. human rights experts want the Duma to drop its proposed nationwide ban on ‘homosexual propaganda’.