French President Francois Hollande said Sunday that negotiations with Moscow were under way to find a solution to a dispute over the sale of two Mistral warships, frozen over the Ukraine crisis.

"We are busy negotiating a solution to the crisis," over the 1.2 billion euro ($1.5 billion) sale, Hollande said on French television.

North Korean leader Kim Jong-Un has scaled the country's highest mountain, state-run media said Sunday, arriving at the summit to tell troops that the hike provides mental energy more powerful than nuclear weapons.

A photo of the leader of the isolated state showed a smiling and wind-swept Kim standing on a snow-covered mountaintop, the sun rising behind him.

Two Syrian doctors urged Russian diplomats at the United Nations on Friday to put pressure on President Bashar al-Assad to allow life-saving medical supplies into a besieged city near Damascus.

The meeting came a day after the U.N. Security Council heard the two doctors give a detailed account of treating victims of chemical attacks last month in Idlib province.

French President Francois Hollande will discuss the Ukraine crisis with his Russian counterpart Vladimir Putin during a visit to Armenia on April 24, a source in his office said Friday.

Putin and Hollande are attending a ceremony in Yerevan marking the 100th anniversary of the Armenian genocide.

U.N. Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon on Friday said it was critical that Ukrainian authorities quickly investigate the murders of two pro-Russia figures in Kiev.

Columnist Oles Buzyna was gunned down in central Kiev on Thursday just hours after former ruling party lawmaker Oleg Kalashnikov was killed at his home in the capital. 

Sweden will raise defense spending by 10.2 billion kronor (1.09 billion euros, $1.18 billion) for the period 2016 to 2020, the government said Friday amid concerns over Russia's military resurgence.

"The agreement sends a signal, internationally, that Sweden is reacting to the security situation in the world, that Sweden is a guarantor for peace and stability in northern Europe and that the defense of Sweden's territory is in focus," Defense Minister Peter Hultqvist told the TT news agency.

Hundreds of U.S. paratroopers have arrived in Ukraine to train its forces fighting pro-Russian rebels, the U.S. army said Friday, a move Moscow warned could "destabilize" the war-torn ex-Soviet country.

"Soldiers of the 173rd Airborne Brigade have been arriving over the last week," Donald Wrenn, a U.S. army spokesman, told AFP.

An unidentified assailant shot dead a pro-Russian journalist in Ukraine Thursday leading Kiev to brand the latest murders of pro-Moscow figures an enemy "provocation".

Reporter Oles Buzyna, 45, a supporter of Ukraine's ousted Kremlin-backed president Viktor Yanukovych, was gunned down in central Kiev just hours after the slaying of former ruling party lawmaker Oleg Kalashnikov in the city.

Russian President Vladimir Putin on Thursday admitted that the Soviet Union had sought to forcibly impose the Soviet model on Eastern Europe after World War II.

"After WWII we tried to impose our model of development on many Eastern European countries and did it by force," Putin said during his annual phone-in with Russians.

Armed police on Thursday raided the office of a Russian rights group led by the exiled critic of Vladimir Putin, Mikhail Khodorkovsky, during the president's marathon annual phone-in session.

A group of police and special forces came to the Moscow office of Open Russia, a rights network led by Khodorkovsky, and searched the premises for protest fliers, Khodorkovsky's spokeswoman Kulle Pispanen wrote on her Facebook page.