President Vladimir Putin took no rest from a grueling trip across half the globe on Friday, jetting straight from the G-8 summit in Canada to Russia's southern regions where scores have died in the worst floods in decades.

"The situation is worse than I thought," Putin told officials in the Stavropol region after taking a quick helicopter flight over stricken areas.

The Emergency Situations Ministry on Sunday put the death toll from the floods at 91 and said the tens of thousands of people who fled their homes after flooding have begun returning to their villages as waters subsided. Some 36,000 flood evacuees from a total of 101,000 had returned to their homes by Sunday, said Emergency Situations Ministry spokesman Viktor Beltsov. He said a total of 360 communities were flooded last week, and at least 8,000 homes were ruined. The floods caused more than $385 million in damage. (Reuters, AP)