During talks at Deauville with Germany and Russia, French President Nicolas Sarkozy made optimistic sounds about establishing a potentially visa-free EU-Russia zone before 2025 that would have a ‘common security concept‘.  President Dmitry Medvedev left the meeting with an invitation to join next month’s NATO summit, and said that Moscow was open to joining a US-led antimissile shield, but also that the issue ‘worries us‘, and implied that NATO should consider making compromises in exchange for Russian involvement.  (This Guardian piece suggests that the plans ‘bring longstanding tensions over European security into the open‘.)  The BBC has some analysis of the talks: ‘Russia’s relations with the main European leaders, Mr Sarkozy, Mrs Merkel etc, are developing much better than relations with the EU as a whole.‘  The US government is optimistic that Russia could join the WTO within a year from now: ‘the end is in sight‘.  The death toll in yesterdays’ attack on the Chechen parliament has risen to 6.  The attack is a blow to Vladimir Putin’s attempts to promote Ramzan Kadyrov’s image (Kadyrov is frequently linked to human rights abuses), says Bloomberg.  The government has set the price of compensation for to the families of those killed in the attacks, together with families of victims of the weekend’s flash floods in Krasnodar, at $32,850.