Conflicts and violence raging around the world sent the number of people forced to flee their homes soaring to a record 60 million last year, the United Nations said Thursday.

That is 8.3 million more refugees and internally displaced people (IDPs) in the world than in 2013 -- the highest-ever increase in a single year, the U.N. refugee agency said in a report titled "World at War".

Prosecutors in war-torn east Ukraine on Wednesday charged two government soldiers with the murder of an elderly woman and her daughter in the separatist eastern province of Donetsk.

The rare public case by pro-Kiev authorities against their own troops comes in the wake of international rights groups' condemnation of both sides' alleged use of torture and other intimidation tactics in the 14-month war.

Russian President Vladimir Putin will meet Saudi Arabia's defense minister this week in a meeting aimed at boosting bilateral ties after years of tensions over Syria, his aide said Wednesday.

Putin will meet Prince Mohammed bin Salman, believed to be a favored son of King Salman, on Thursday on the sidelines of the Saint Petersburg International Economic Forum, the Kremlin's top foreign policy aide Yury Ushakov said.

NATO head Jens Stoltenberg warned Tuesday that Russian plans to deploy 40 new nuclear ballistic missiles announced by President Vladimir Putin were part of a dangerous pattern of behavior by Moscow.

"This nuclear saber-rattling by Russia is unjustified, destabilizing and it is dangerous," Stoltenberg said after a meeting with European Commission head Jean-Claude Juncker.

Ukraine on Tuesday reported the death of two soldiers in advance of European-mediated talks with pro-Russian insurgents aimed at breaking a deadlock over the future status of eastern separatist enclaves.

Kiev's military spokesman Andriy Lysenko said government forces came under particularly heavy fire from 122-millimeter howitzers in the rebel-controlled Lugansk province.

U.S. Secretary of State John Kerry on Monday pressed his Russian counterpart Sergei Lavrov to ensure that Moscow respects the ceasefire in eastern Ukraine, the State Department said.

In a telephone call to Lavrov, Kerry "urged Russia to seize the opportunity of upcoming meetings of the Trilateral Contact Group and its Working Groups to accelerate progress on implementing the Minsk agreements," signed in February, said John Kirby, a State Department spokesman.

Several hundred Ukrainians in the country's war-torn east demanded Monday that pro-Russian insurgents remove scores of rocket launchers from crowded city neighborhoods and stop provoking return government fire on their homes.

The small but unusual demonstration outside the offices of the self-proclaimed Donetsk People's Republic suggested that an undercurrent of resentment with the new authorities was running through the streets of eastern Ukraine's main rebel-held town.

War-scarred Ukraine was engulfed Monday by a scandal involving the chiefs of its two main domestic security agencies amid claims of criminal dealings with top Russian tycoons.

The standoff -- sparked by who was to blame for a massive oil complex fire that is still raging -- pits the head of Ukraine's State Security Service (SBU) against a national prosecutor with the power to order the arrest of anyone except the most senior government figures.

Poland said on Sunday it is in talks with the United States on the possibility of Washington storing heavy weaponry on Polish soil, as regional tensions run high over Russia and the conflict in Ukraine.

Defense Minister Tomasz Siemoniak said the negotiations were part of discussions on increasing the American military presence in Poland and other eastern European members of NATO.

Ukraine's military on Sunday said escalating clashes between government forces and pro-Russian insurgents in the separatist east left one Ukrainian soldier dead and 21 injured.

A top military adviser for Ukrainian President Petro Poroshenko said the fighting had intensified around the rebel-held airport of the insurgents' de facto capital Donetsk.