Iranian President Hassan Rouhani said Thursday a Syrian peace conference planned for later this month will fail if Tehran, Damascus' main regional ally, does not participate, media reported.

The remarks came ahead of a meeting Monday at which Russia and the United States are to discuss Tehran's possible involvement in the talks set to start in Montreux, Switzerland on January 22.

Russia on Thursday demanded the immediate release of a trawler and its crew seized by Senegal for alleged illegal fishing off the country's coast, a foreign ministry spokesman said.

At a meeting with Senegal's acting charge d'affaires, Russian diplomats made "a firm demand to the Senegalese authorities to immediately release the Russian fishing trawler, the Oleg Naydenov, and its crew," spokesman Alexander Lukashevich told Rossiya 24 television.

Moscow's human rights commissioner said Thursday he will lead a team of lawmakers to the U.S. military prison in Guantanamo Bay next week for a meeting with its last Russian captive.

The Russian foreign ministry's human rights envoy Konstantin Dolgov said U.S. officials had given their tentative approval for the meeting to go ahead on January 17.

Russian President Vladimir Putin and his Iranian counterpart Hassan Rouhani on Thursday discussed the Islamic republic's nuclear negotiations with world powers and Syria peace talks, the Kremlin said.

The leaders discussed "current international issues, including the situation in Syria in the context of preparations for the Geneva 2 conference, and the implementation of agreements on the Iranian nuclear program," the Kremlin said in a statement that did not specify who initiated the telephone call.

A European Parliament committee approved plans Thursday to hear U.S. intelligence whistleblower Edward Snowden, whose revelations about U.S. snooping on EU leaders has sparked uproar against Washington.

Parliament's Civil Liberties committee voted 36 in favor, two against, to hear Snowden by video-link from Russia where he has found temporary asylum.

Russia on Thursday launched a counter-terror operation after five bodies riddled with bullets were found in a southern region bordering the Winter Olympics host Sochi, less than a month before the start of the games.

Two districts in the Stavropol region were placed on high alert after the bodies were found in four cars, one of them apparently booby-trapped, in the area on Wednesday, the Interfax news agency quoted the FSB security service as saying.

Russia on Wednesday blocked a British-drafted U.N. Security Council statement condemning the Syrian government attacks on the city of Aleppo, diplomats said.

It was the second time in a month that Russia objected to a western bid to slam President Bashar Assad's air assault against Syria's biggest city that has killed hundreds since December 15.

Former oil tycoon Mikhail Khodorkovsky, who was freed by Moscow last month after a decade in jail, vowed Sunday to fight for Russian political prisoners from his new base in Switzerland.

"You can't live with peace of mind when you know there are political detainees rotting in prison," Khodorkovsky told Swiss public television SRF on the train that took him from Berlin to Basel.

Danish and Norwegian vessels left the Cypriot port of Limassol Friday and headed towards Syria to escort a delayed shipment of chemical weapons for destruction, a spokesman said.

"The Norwegian-Danish task group to transport Syria's chemical agents to destruction left the port of Limassol this morning," said Norwegian armed forces spokesman Lars Magne Hovtun.

A Ukrainian court on Friday launched highly-charged hearings against jailed opposition leader Yulia Tymoshenko's attorney that government critics have branded a political show trial.

Former prime minister Tymoshenko's lawyer Sergiy Vlasenko is accused by his former wife of domestic violence -- a case that emerged in November just as Ukraine was deciding whether to sign a historic agreement with the European Union.