The White House on Wednesday called the deadly violence on the streets of the Ukrainian capital "completely outrageous" and renewed its appeal to President Viktor Yanukovych to de-escalate the situation.

Clashes in Kiev between police and anti-government protesters that have claimed 26 lives are "completely outrageous" and "have no place in the 21st century," Deputy National Security Advisor Ben Rhodes told reporters aboard Air Force One.

The French, German and Polish foreign ministers will be in Ukraine on Thursday after the deadly escalation in the country's political crisis, French Foreign Minister Laurent Fabius said.

Calling for "restoring political dialogue between the opposition and the government," Fabius said he, German Foreign Minister Frank-Walter Steinmeier and Poland's Radoslaw Sikorski would hold meetings in Ukraine early Thursday before emergency talks among EU ministers in Brussels.

A man from the Central African Republic who stabbed a Russian diplomat and his wife in Khartoum has been jailed for three years, Russia's embassy in Sudan said on Wednesday.

The couple were attacked just outside their Khartoum diplomatic mission on January 28, in a rare example of violence against foreigners in Sudan.

Russia on Tuesday blamed the policies of Western countries for the latest clashes between pro-EU protesters and police on the streets of Kiev.

"What is happening is a direct consequence of the policy of connivance among those Western politicians and European agencies that have been shutting their eyes to the aggressive actions of Ukraine's radical forces since the beginning of the crisis," the Russian foreign ministry said in a statement.

Ukrainian opposition protesters on Tuesday attacked the party headquarters of embattled President Viktor Yanukovych as fierce clashes with police erupted again in Kiev for the first time in weeks.

Protesters briefly seized the party headquarters after several hundred attacked it with Molotov cocktails and smashed their way inside but later withdrew as smoke continued to billow from part of the building, an Agence France Presse reporter at the scene said.

A Moscow court on Tuesday opened the trial of radical opposition leader Sergei Udaltsov on charges of using the funding of a Georgian politician to try to destabilize President Vladimir Putin's rule.

The high-profile case stems from bloody protests involving tens of thousands of demonstrators that broke out in Moscow on the eve of Putin's swearing-in to a third Kremlin term in May 2012.

Moscow said Monday it would release two billion dollars this week from a vital aid package to Ukraine it had effectively frozen when protests escalated last month.

Asked about the next tranche of the $15 billion package, Finance Minister Anton Siluanov told Russian news agencies: "This week, two billion."

Iran's ambassador to Moscow on Monday said Russia could build the Islamic republic a second nuclear power reactor in exchange for massive oil shipments that have raised grave concern in Washington.

Ambassador Mehdi Sanaei said the two close trading partners have been negotiating Iran's delivery of hundreds of thousands of barrels of oil a day since a meeting at a regional summit in September between Russian President Vladimir Putin and his counterpart Hassan Rouhani.

A court in Georgia on Monday sentenced former prime minister Vano Merabishvili to five and a half years in prison for embezzlement in a case his lawyer and allies denounced as political persecution.

The court found Merabishvili, who headed the government of ex-president Mikheil Saakashvili, guilty of giving fictitious jobs to activists who were involved in his party's losing parliamentary election campaign in 2012.

Russia on Monday dismissed U.S. claims that it was "enabling" Syria's President Bashar Assad to stay in power and failing to push for a transitional government that could help end the bloody conflict.

"We have done everything we have promised," Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov told reporters, referring to Moscow's efforts to get the Damascus regime to hold direct peace talks with opponents.