The Russian Orthodox Church looks set to...

Kommersant newspaper reported on Thursday that the government had vowed to promptly turn the bill - being drafted by the economics ministry since 2007 - into law. A government commission on religious organizations held a session on Wednesday.

"We discussed practically all articles of the bill," secretary Andrei Sebentsov told the business daily. "We agreed to remove all the weak points in it by February."

Observers said the bill would chiefly benefit the country"s dominant religion, making the Russian Orthodox Church a major real estate owner.

At a meeting with Russian Patriarch Kirill earlier this month, Prime Minister Vladimir Putin called for progress in the long-stalled process to legitimize the property used by religious groups, including buildings and land plots.

In almost two decades since the collapse of the officially atheist Soviet Union, the Orthodox Church has through government decrees regained ownership of just 100 or so of 16,000 churches

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