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.

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. 

Ukraine's central bank chief said on Tuesday that the strife-torn country's economy contracted by 7.5 percent in 2014 while inflation soared in a year more painful than any since World War II.

But Valeria Gontareva said the pro-Western leaders who rose to power in Kiev after the February ouster of an unpopular Moscow-backed president were optimistic about the chances of a rebound in 2015.

Hungary's gas pipeline network operator FGSZ said on Monday that it will resume gas supplies to neighboring Ukraine, after suspending it indefinitely in September prompting criticism from Ukraine's state-owned gas firm Naftogaz.

"FGSZ Ltd will again secure gas supplies towards Ukraine from January 1, 2015," the company said in a short statement posted on their website on Monday.

Ukraine's Western-backed leader Petro Poroshenko promised Monday to meet Russia's Vladimir Putin and involve U.S. President Barack Obama in his stalled push for peace with pro-Kremlin fighters in the separatist east.

The surprise announcement came days after the first direct peace talks with the rebels in three months broke down without any evident progress after just one acrimonious round.

Ukraine's parliament on Monday adopted an austerity budget that hikes import prices and shrinks social spending in order to balance the books under a plan backed by the International Monetary Fund.

The highly-disputed 2015 plan was pushed through by the government-led coalition after a marathon debate that ended after 4:00 am.

German Chancellor Angela Merkel on Sunday welcomed a prisoner swap between Ukraine's government and pro-Russian rebels but expressed regret about the stalling of truce talks.

Merkel had late Saturday discussed the Ukraine crisis in phone calls with the country's President Petro Poroshenko as well as with Kazakh President Nursultan Nazarbayev, her spokeswoman said in a statement.

Ukrainian President Petro Poroshenko on Saturday welcomed home as heroes 145 soldiers freed by pro-Russian rebels during the largest prisoner swap of the eight-month separatist war.

The Western-backed leader, beaming and wearing a black bomber jacket, walked up to the back cargo bay of a military transport plane that landed at a military airport outside Kiev in the dawn hours of Saturday to hail the men.

The two warring sides lined up the prisoners some 100 meters apart on an isolated stretch of highway in the no-man's land between their frontlines.