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Oleg Deripaska had no time for empty formalities. By his 40th birthday he had risen to be the wealthiest man in Russia, with a $44 billion global empire and 290,000 employees.

A few weeks ago Deripaska met again with Medvedev—this time as a humbled man. His empire was lost unless the Russian president got its creditors to hold off foreclosing $7.4 billion in urgent overdue loans—less than half of Deripaska's total indebtedness. Medvedev reluctantly agreed.

Kudrin offered no relief to him or any of the oligarchs in the room. "There will be bankruptcies," Kudrin told the oligarchs.

Angela Merkel, the German ­chancellor, and Nicolas Sarkozy, the French ­president, will throw down the gauntlet today by staging a joint press conference in ­London demanding the G20 summit usher in a new era of global regulation of banks, ­executive bonuses, hedge funds andoffshore tax havens.In what will be seen as a challenge to Obama, they will also insist nobody at the summit should discuss a fresh stimulus package, despite a report from the ­Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development that "world trade is now in freefall".

Brown was reported to be working hard to persuade the Chinese to contribute more to global institutions such as the IMF, in return for extra voting rights.

The French President Nicolas Sarkozy said today neither France nor Germany was satisfied with current proposals for an accord at this week's G20 summit and warned that he would not accept any "false compromises".

There is strong pressure for an agreement but divisions have shown up between the United States and Britain on one side and continental Europeans over the balance between extra financial stimulus and the need for regulation. Sarkozy did not explicitly repeat a threat to walk out of the gathering but said he would not be party to any attempt to sidestep firm proposals for change. "I will not associate myself with a summit that would end with a communique made of false compromises that would not tackle the issues that concern us," he told Europe 1 radio in an interview.

Millions of Russian workers have been laid off or sacked recently amid the global economic downturn, and the government in Moscow is already facing angry protests by ordinary people.

in Pikalevo, something unusual for modern Russia is happening: the people are taking a stand against the government and its economic policies, blaming them as much as the factory-owners for their plight. The opening salvo was fired in mid-February, when thousands took to the streets holding black balloons as a sign of mourning for the jobs they have lost. Some carried placards accusing the government of being "impotent".

The local trade union, under the dynamic leadership of Svetlana Antropova, has been effective in channelling this public anger. In a particularly troubling sign for the government, she is also a member of the ruling United Russia party, led by Prime Minister Vladimir Putin. "Most people don't have enough to eat. Some are starving," she said. "People here don't understand why the government is supporting the oligarchs and banks instead of supporting individual workers directly."

They pledged a total of $1.1 trillion (£681bn) in funding to tackle the crisis, including $750bn to the International Monetary Fund, $250bn to boost global trade and $100bn for international development banks to lend to the poorest countries.

Leaders also agreed to introduce tougher financial regulations and sanctions against secretive tax havens.

When President Barack Obama comes to London next week, he will find one great power missing at the world's summit table: Europe. Five of the 20 leaders at the G20 meeting will be Europeans, representing France, Germany, Britain, Italy and the EU, but the whole will be less than the sum of its parts. There will be plenty of Europeans but no Europe.

Obama's European trip, which continues to the Nato summit and then an EU-US meeting in Prague, will also be about foreign and security policy. Here, Europe is even less of a single player. To be fair, Europeans have got their act together on diplomacy with Iran, though it remains to be seen whether that European unity would survive an American request for more economic sanctions on Tehran. On most of the other big issues on Obama's agenda - Afghanistan, Pakistan, relations with Russia and China, nuclear proliferation - there is no Europe. There are individual European countries.

Unlike George W Bush at the beginning of his first term, President Obama is both ideologically and pragmatically predisposed to work with a stronger, more united Europe. But even he can't work with something that doesn't exist.

The bad news for Bush’s successor, Barack Obama, is that he now faces a much larger and potentially more troubling axis—an axis of upheaval.

ultimately I concluded, in The War of the World, that three factors made the location and timing of lethal organized violence more or less predictable in the last century. The first factor was ethnic disintegration: Violence was worst in areas of mounting ethnic tension. The second factor was economic volatility: The greater the magnitude of economic shocks, the more likely conflict was. And the third factor was empires in decline: When structures of imperial rule crumbled, battles for political power were most bloody.

When Bush’s speechwriters coined the phrase “axis of evil” (originally “axis of hatred”), they were drawing a parallel with the World War II alliance between Germany, Italy, and Japan, formalized in the Tripartite Pact of September 1940. The axis of upheaval, by contrast, is more reminiscent of the decade before the outbreak of World War II, when the Great Depression unleashed a wave of global political crises.

The European Union’s crisis of leadership during the economic downturn was thrown into sharp relief on Wednesday, as the current president of the 27-nation bloc labeled President Obama’s emergency stimulus package “a way to hell” that will “undermine the stability of the global financial market.”

What made the situation even more trying for those who hope that the European Union might find a common voice in this crisis was that Mr. Topolanek’s own governing coalition collapsed on Tuesday. The Czech opposition party, which favors bigger increases in domestic spending during the slump, won a no-confidence vote on his leadership.

Despite widespread fears that European nations could prolong the current recession unless they act in concert with one another and the United States, the slump has highlighted differences over deficit spending, interest rates and possible bailouts for new union members in the East. There are few signs that the alliance is developing the political leadership to match its economic weight.Britain, like the United States, has undertaken an aggressive fiscal stimulus and slashed interest rates. But Germany and France have opposed calls for further large stimulus packages and even greater deficit spending, while the European Central Bank has kept interest rates higher than they are in the United States and Britain. Germany and even some Central European countries opposed calls by Hungary for the creation of a single rescue fund for heavily indebted countries in Eastern Europe.