This is a download from the BBC. It's from our own correspondent.

We make one version of the programme for the BBC World Service,

but this is the latest edition broadcast on BBC Radio 4. It's introduced by Kate A.D.

Hello. Today, why some will say go easy on Russia when East meets West to discuss the Ukraine crisis next week.

Its homework in the dark now as Egypt makes life tougher for the people in the Gaza Strip.

We find out why the city Kipling described as a place of

dreadful night wants to be a little more like London and how a king provided a

happy ending for the last storyteller in Marrakesh.

There are to be top-level talks on Ukraine next week with relations between Russia and the

West now severely strained. The US Secretary of State, John Kerry, will sit down in

Geneva with the Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov and representatives from Kyiv and

the European Union.

The German Chancellor Angela Merkel spoke to President Obama on Thursday night and agreed

that more sanctions on Russia would follow if President Putin ordered his forces further into Ukraine.

But Steve Evans in Berlin says Mrs Merkel has to tread carefully.

In Germany there is an ambivalence about Russia.

On the wall of the office of the left-wing MP Jan Van Arkin

is a very big framed black and white picture.

It's the classic image of a red Army soldier balancing precariously on the turrets of the old Reichstark building and raising the hammer and sickle banner the smoldering ruins of Berlin in the background.

I asked him why he had it on his wall in the German Parliament, and he replied with a laugh

that it was taken on his birthday, May the 1st, and then he added more seriously that it tells a story.

The Russians were liberators, he said.

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