Top U.S. diplomat John Kerry and his Russian counterpart Sergei Lavrov spoke Thursday to discuss the crises in the Middle East and Ukraine, officials said.

"Secretary Kerry and Foreign Minister Lavrov spoke by phone today. They discussed the situation in the Middle East and Ukraine," according to a senior State Department official. 

France would only deliver two warships ordered by Russia if there were concrete signs of lasting peace in Ukraine, the French defense minister said Thursday.

Russia has been accused by the West of arming and bankrolling a rebellion in eastern Ukraine, a charge Moscow denies.

President Vladimir Putin thanked Russians for defending national interests in what he described as an historic year that saw Crimea annexed from Ukraine and the "best ever" Winter Olympic Games.

In a New Year's Eve message usually aired at midnight, which has already been shown to Russians in the Far East, Putin said that love for the motherland was what ensured that the Crimean peninsula joined Russia in March after a controversial referendum.

A Russian court on Wednesday ordered two people to spend two weeks in jail after a protest in support of top Kremlin critic Alexei Navalny, who was convicted of fraud in a controversial trial.

About 250 people were detained at a Moscow protest called by Navalny on Tuesday after a judge sentenced him and his younger brother Oleg to three and a half years in prison.

Russian President Vladimir Putin on Wednesday sent a New Year's greeting to U.S. counterpart Barack Obama, saying the two countries share mutual responsibility to ensure world peace.

In a statement showing Putin's New Year's messages to heads of state across the world, the Russian leader addressed Obama despite the crisis in U.S.-Russian relations over Ukraine, saying the "Russian-American partnership could have been developing successfully."

Lithuania said Wednesday it detained a military officer for alleged espionage, possibly for Russia, in the latest Cold War-style incident amid heightened tensions between Moscow and the West.

The air force officer, whose name was not released, is suspected "of spying for a foreign country by providing it with information, including classified data," the prosecutor's office said in a statement.

A Canadian frigate with 250 marines on board set off from Halifax on the Atlantic coast Tuesday to join NATO forces in the Mediterranean Sea monitoring the Ukraine crisis.

HMCS Fredericton, which is carrying a Sea King helicopter and an air detachment, will replace HMCS Toronto, which joined the permanent NATO forces in July. 

The European Union said a Russian court's conviction Tuesday of opposition leader Alexei Navalny and his brother seemed to be politically motivated, while calling for restraint during any protests against the verdict.

"The guilty verdict delivered today... against Alexei Navalny and his brother Oleg Navalny appears to be politically motivated," a spokeswoman for EU foreign policy chief Federica Mogherini said in a statement.

Top Kremlin critic Alexei Navalny was detained by police on Tuesday after he violated his house arrest to join a protest in Moscow over a guilty verdict against him and his brother in a controversial fraud case.

Dozens of other people were also detained as hundreds gathered in central Moscow after the charismatic 38-year-old opposition leader called on Russians to take to the streets against President Vladimir Putin's regime following Tuesday's court ruling.

The U.S. rolled out new sanctions against Russian officials Monday under its "Magnitsky" law, named after a Russian whistleblower who died in a Moscow prison in 2009.

The U.S. Treasury Department added a deputy interior minister, an administrator for Chechnya and two other untitled individuals to the sanctions list, banning them from travel to the United States.