Russian divers Sunday recovered five bodies from the wreckage of a helicopter that crashed into a lake in the remote northwestern tundra with 18 people including top regional officials and businessmen on board.

Two people were rushed to hospital with broken legs after the Mi-8 helicopter smashed into Munozero lake in a remote area on the northwestern Kola peninsula late Saturday, regional officials said.

Ukraine accused Russia on Saturday of unleashing a global propaganda campaign to persuade global powers not to recognize an election that gave the presidency to a pro-Western tycoon.

Washington for its part admitted to a "fundamental disagreement" with Russia and said President Barack Obama would meet Petro Poroshenko, whose May 25 presidential election win Moscow refuses to acknowledge, in Warsaw on Wednesday.

U.S. President Barack Obama will meet Ukraine's president-elect next week during a European tour aimed at shoring up regional security amid reports that a second team of European monitors went missing in the country's restive east.

The meeting in Warsaw will come less than two weeks after pro-European Petro Poroshenko, a chocolate tycoon, was elected in the shadow of a showdown between Washington and Moscow over the fate of Ukraine that has brought relations to their lowest level since the Cold War.

U.S. lawmakers urged France to break its contract to sell two warships to Russia and instead sell or lease them to NATO, which said Friday it was up to Paris to decide.

Three congressmen led by Eliot Engel, the top Democrat on the House Foreign Affairs Committee, wrote to the transatlantic alliance's Secretary General Anders Fogh Rasmussen expressing concern about the construction and sale to the Russian navy of two Mistral-class helicopter carriers.

Ukraine has paid Russia part of its gas debt, and talks will continue next week to avert a gas shutdown to the crisis-hit country, EU Energy Commissioner Guenther Oettinger said Friday.

"We don't have a final deal yet but we have made progress," he said after mediating between Russian Energy Minister Alexander Novak and his Ukrainian counterpart Yuriy Prodan, as well as both countries' energy companies, in Berlin. 

Russian troops massed on Ukraine's borders are moving back toward Moscow, but there are still "danger signs," U.S. Secretary of State John Kerry said late Thursday.

"There is evidence of Russians crossing over, trained personnel from Chechnya trained in Russia, who've come across to stir things up, to engage in fighting," the top U.S. diplomat told PBS television.

Russia on Thursday called on the West to prevent “a national disaster” in Ukraine as further deadly violence erupted in the country's east, killing 12 soldiers.

"We once again call on our Western partners to use all their influence on Kiev to stop Ukraine from descending into a national disaster," the ministry said in a statement.

The United States, Russia and the Middle East must "find the courage for united action" on Syria, the Vatican said Thursday ahead of a meeting of aid groups on the crisis.

The international community "must shake off its lethargy," Guinean Cardinal Robert Sarah, head of the Vatican Cor Unum department which coordinates Roman Catholic charities, said in an interview with La Stampa's Vatican Insider.

Russia on Thursday signed an agreement with Belarus and Kazakhstan on creating a Eurasian Economic Union designed to strengthen ties between the three ex-Soviet countries.

The agreement was signed by Russian President Vladimir Putin, Belarussian President Alexander Lukashenko and Kazakh President Nursultan Nazarbayev in the Kazakh capital of Astana.

The president-elect of Ukraine told a German newspaper Wednesday that he planned to hold talks with Russian President Vladimir Putin in a bid to "ease" the crisis in Ukraine.

"We will hold talks with Putin in order to ease the situation and make peace. When and where these talks will take place, is not yet decided," Petro Poroshenko told the Bild daily.