Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov on Wednesday resisted Western pressure to meet his Ukrainian counterpart but said talks with the United States and others would continue in coming days, as Moscow and Berlin discussed the “normalization” of the situation in Ukraine.

At the end of a day of intense diplomatic negotiations in Paris, Lavrov left the French foreign ministry without having held a hoped-for meeting with acting Ukrainian foreign minister Andriy Deshchytsya, a member of a government Moscow is refusing to recognize.

Former U.S. secretary of state Hillary Clinton has compared Russian President Vladimir Putin's recent steps in Ukraine to aggression by Adolf Hitler in 1930s Nazi Germany, a local paper reported.

Clinton, speaking at a private event Tuesday in southern California, said Putin's apparent deployment of Russian troops into neighboring Ukraine -- a former Soviet satellite state -- to protect Russian citizens and Russian-speakers recalls moves by Hitler to protect ethnic Germans living outside of Germany.

U.S. Treasury Secretary Jacob Lew warned Russia on Wednesday that its actions in Ukraine have put its role in the elite Group of Eight club of leading nations at risk.

With Russia to host a summit of G8 leaders in Sochi in June, Lew linked its incursion into Ukraine's Crimea and interventions in the country's politics to Moscow's continuing position in the G8.

U.N. deputy secretary-general Jan Eliasson appealed Wednesday for dialogue and deescalation in the Ukraine crisis as he urged participants to refrain from Cold War reflexes.

Speaking to journalists after meeting members of the interim Ukrainian government in Kiev, Eliasson said it was "in everybody's interest" to find a settlement in Crimea, where pro-Moscow forces are in de facto control.

Russian Defense Minister Sergei Shoigu said Wednesday that photographs from Crimea of military vehicles with Russian numberplates and video of an armed man claiming he is Russian were a "provocation" and "nonsense."

Shoigu was responding to questions about photographs taken in Crimea that apparently show off-road vehicles used by the Russian army with Russian number plates, and also video of one of the armed men patrolling a Ukrainian military base near the Russian border, who claimed "We are Russian citizens."

German Chancellor Angela Merkel called on Russia on Wednesday not to do anything to destabilize the situation in Ukraine after pro-Moscow forces took de-facto control of Ukraine's majority Russian Crimean Peninsula.

"Russia must desist from any taunting which could lead to a destabilization of the situation," Merkel's spokesman Steffen Seibert told a government news briefing.

Germany's military will fly around 50 Ukrainians injured during unrest in central Kiev to the EU country for treatment, officials said Wednesday.

The move follows a request by the Ukrainian government to the German embassy in Kiev for help with the group, the defense ministry said in a statement.

The Organization for Security and Co-operation in Europe (OSCE) said Wednesday it was sending a mission of 35 military observers to Ukraine.

"It is my hope that this military visit will help to de-escalate tensions in Ukraine," OSCE Secretary General Lamberto Zannier said in a statement.

Ukraine is reinforcing security measures at its nuclear power plants in response to Russian threats, Ukraine's ambassador told the U.N. atomic agency in a letter seen by Agence France Presse on Wednesday.

"Illegal actions of the Russian armed forces on the Ukrainian territory and the threat of force amount to a grave threat to security of Ukraine with its potential consequences for its nuclear power infrastructure," Ihor Prokopchuk said.

Russia sold a record $11.3 billion in foreign currency to support the ruble on March 3, when the ruble came under unprecedented pressure due to concerns about conflict in Ukraine, central bank data showed Wednesday.

The Russian central bank sold foreign currency to buy rubles and prevent the Russian currency from falling further in value, after the market reacted with panic to parliamentary approval for President Vladimir Putin's request to allow military action in Ukraine on what has been dubbed "Black Monday".