The EU plans to give Ukraine a further 1.8 billion euros to help prop up an economy hit hard by a bloody conflict with Russian-backed rebels, European Commission head Jean-Claude Juncker said Thursday.

The 1.8 billion euros ($2.1 billion) in medium-term loans will help Ukraine "with the critical challenges" it faces and support the political and economic reforms the European Union believes are crucial to its future, a Commission statement said.

Hackers blocked the website of German Chancellor Angela Merkel on Wednesday in an online attack claimed by a pro-Russian group opposed to the Ukrainian government.

Merkel's official website and those of the government and the Bundestag lower house of parliament were temporarily inaccessible after what spokesman Steffen Seibert called a "serious attack".

Ukraine said on Wednesday three of its soldiers were killed in a spate of Orthodox Christmas Eve attacks by pro-Russian insurgents in the former Soviet republic's industrial east.

The deaths bring to more than 20 the number of Ukranian troops killed since the warring sides signed a reinforced truce deal on December 9.

The world is losing its ability to prevent conflicts and the lack of "effective leadership" has led to the worst displacement situation since World War II, the U.N. refugee chief warned Tuesday.

Antonio Guterres, the U.N. High Commissioner for Refugees, said in Ankara that the twin crises in Iraq and Syria had created a serious displacement situation and the world showed no effective leadership to address the challenges.

Thirteen Ukrainian soldiers were killed and 17 injured when the bus they were travelling in collided with military trucks in bad weather in the war-torn east, officials said on Tuesday.

The collision Monday night was due to bad weather and took place during the rotation of professional soldiers and volunteers deployed in eastern Ukraine to fight the pro-Russian rebels who have waged an insurgency against Kiev since April, the National Guard said in a statement.

Ukrainian police on Monday launched a terror probe into a blast in the government-controlled port of Odessa after an explosion outside a building housing a soldiers' support center.

Local authorities said the late Sunday explosion in the city of one million caused no injuries but shattered windows in the office of volunteers helping soldiers fighting pro-Russian insurgents in eastern Ukraine.

French President Francois Hollande said Monday that biting Western sanctions against Russia should be lifted if progress were made in resolving the Ukraine crisis.

"I think the sanctions must stop now. They must be lifted if there is progress. If there is no progress the sanctions will remain," he said during a wide-ranging two-hour interview with France Inter radio station.

Tougher sanctions may destabilize the situation further in Russia and plunge the country into chaos, German deputy chancellor Sigmar Gabriel warned in a newspaper interview on Sunday.

"The goal was never to push Russia politically and economically into chaos," Gabriel told the Bild am Sonntag.

A torch-lit march held in Kiev to honor a controversial anti-Soviet resistance leader shows Ukraine is following in the footsteps of the Nazis, a senior Russian foreign ministry official said Friday.

"Torch-lit marches in Ukraine demonstrate that it is continuing to move along the path of the Nazis! And this is in the center of civilized Europe!" Konstantin Dolgov, the foreign ministry's human rights envoy, wrote on Twitter.

Indonesian recovery teams narrowed the search area for AirAsia Flight 8501 Friday, hopeful they were closing in on the plane's crash site, with a total of 30 bodies and more debris recovered from the sea.

French and Singaporean investigators joined the hunt for the Airbus A320-200, which disappeared from radar during a storm Sunday en route from Indonesia's second city of Surabaya to Singapore with 162 people on board.