Syria's regime-tolerated domestic opposition and members of the main exiled group demanding the president's ouster met Thursday in Cairo to discuss Moscow's invitation to host talks with the Damascus government.

The exiled National Coalition and top opposition figure Moaz al-Khatib have already announced they will not attend the talks aimed at finding a political solution to Syria's nearly four-year war.

China would welcome a visit by Kim Jong-Un to Moscow, a government spokeswoman said Thursday, amid speculation that the North Korean leader could make his international debut in the Russian capital later this year.

May 9 marks the 70th anniversary of the Soviet Union's victory over Nazi Germany in World War II, and around 20 foreign leaders, including Chinese President Xi Jinping, are expected to attend a commemoration event in Moscow.

The shelling of a bus and clashes in Ukraine's separatist east left 34 people dead Thursday as Kiev was forced to abandon its defense of Donetsk's airport in one of the deadliest days of the nine-month war.

In the worst incident, 13 civilians died when shelling hit a trolleybus Thursday morning in the rebel bastion of Donetsk, with Kiev alleging that ultimate blame for the tragedy rested with Russia.

The foreign ministers of Russia, Ukraine, Germany and France ended their latest Berlin crisis meeting Wednesday with a joint call to cease hostilities in Ukraine but no breakthrough agreement to stop the bloodshed.

The talks had been held against the unpromising backdrop of fresh clashes between Ukrainian government forces and pro-Moscow rebels in the east of the former Soviet republic, and after Ukraine's president accused Moscow of fueling the war with fresh troops and tanks.

President Petro Poroshenko said on Wednesday more than 9,000 Russian troops were backing Ukrainian separatist fighters that Moscow will be under pressure to reel in at high-stakes peace talks in Berlin.

Poroshenko's claims followed days of heavy fighting that has left an already shaky September truce in tatters and forced the pro-Western leader to cut short his visit to the World Economic Forum in Davos.

The Russian government is preparing to launch an "anti-crisis program" to tackle the country's stalled economy at the cost of 1.375 trillion rubles (18 billion euros, $21 billion), deputy prime minister Igor Shuvalov said Wednesday.

Meeting President Vladimir Putin, Shuvalov said: "According to this plan, now we need to finance measures to the sum of 1.375 trillion rubles," according to the Interfax news agency. 

Russian President Vladimir Putin will visit Hungary on February 17 with controversial Prime Minister Viktor Orban seen as one of his closest European allies.

"We will have bilateral and geopolitical issues on the agenda... including the energy security of central Europe as it is one of the most important issues for the region," Hungarian Foreign Minister Peter Szijjarto told public radio.

Russia on Wednesday responded disparagingly to President Barack Obama's State of the Union address, claiming it showed that the United States wanted to dominate world affairs.

"Americans have set a course for confrontation," Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov told reporters after the U.S. president said sanctions against Moscow over Ukraine had left the Russian economy in tatters.

Western countries are trying to use the Ukraine conflict to topple President Vladimir Putin and wreck Russia's economy, the president's spokesman said in an interview published on Wednesday.

"In the West they are trying to kick out Putin, to isolate him in international politics, to throttle Russia economically due to their interests, to bring down Putin," Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov said.

North Korea argued Wednesday that the admission of inaccuracies in the memoir of a high-profile gulag survivor rendered any existing or future U.N. resolution on Pyongyang's human rights record "invalid".

Defector Shin Dong-Hyuk acknowledged this week that some elements of his story as told in the best-selling book "Escape from Camp 14" were inaccurate, although he stressed that the crucial details of his suffering and torture still stood.