The U.S. State Department sought the propaganda edge Wednesday evoking writer Dostoyevsky to denounce what it called Russian President Vladimir Putin's "fiction: 10 false claims about Ukraine."

In a mounting war of words between the former Cold War foes, U.S. and Russian officials have in recent days put out starkly different versions surrounding the deployment of Russian troops in Ukraine's Crimea peninsula.

The European Union decided Wednesday to freeze assets held in the 28-nation bloc by 18 Ukrainians accused of embezzlement.

The freeze will take effect on Thursday when their names are listed in the EU Official Journal and targets 18 people "identified as responsible" for misappropriating Ukrainian state funds, a statement said.

NATO is stepping up its cooperation with Ukraine but reviewing "an entire range" of cooperation with Russia, the secretary-general of the alliance, Anders Fogh Rasmussen, said Wednesday.

Speaking after talks with Russia's ambassadors to NATO, Rasmussen said "an entire range of NATO-Russia cooperation is under review", including the suspension of a joint mission involving the destruction of Syrian chemical weapons.

Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov on Wednesday resisted Western pressure to meet his Ukrainian counterpart but said talks with the United States and others would continue in coming days, as Moscow and Berlin discussed the “normalization” of the situation in Ukraine.

At the end of a day of intense diplomatic negotiations in Paris, Lavrov left the French foreign ministry without having held a hoped-for meeting with acting Ukrainian foreign minister Andriy Deshchytsya, a member of a government Moscow is refusing to recognize.

The United Nations protested Wednesday that its envoy to the tense Ukrainian region of Crimea had been threatened by unidentified armed men, but denied reports he had been kidnapped.

U.N. Deputy Secretary-General Jan Eliasson told reporters Robert Serry had been accosted by gunmen outside naval headquarters in Simferopol and warned "he should leave Crimea."

Former U.S. secretary of state Hillary Clinton has compared Russian President Vladimir Putin's recent steps in Ukraine to aggression by Adolf Hitler in 1930s Nazi Germany, a local paper reported.

Clinton, speaking at a private event Tuesday in southern California, said Putin's apparent deployment of Russian troops into neighboring Ukraine -- a former Soviet satellite state -- to protect Russian citizens and Russian-speakers recalls moves by Hitler to protect ethnic Germans living outside of Germany.

U.S. Treasury Secretary Jacob Lew warned Russia on Wednesday that its actions in Ukraine have put its role in the elite Group of Eight club of leading nations at risk.

With Russia to host a summit of G8 leaders in Sochi in June, Lew linked its incursion into Ukraine's Crimea and interventions in the country's politics to Moscow's continuing position in the G8.

The United States will expand military cooperation with Poland and Baltic states to show "support" for its allies after Russia's intervention in Ukraine, Pentagon chief Chuck Hagel said Wednesday.

The moves to expand aviation training in Poland and step up the U.S. role in NATO's air patrols over Baltic countries were clearly designed to reassure alliance partners in Central and Eastern Europe who are alarmed over Russia's actions in the Crimean peninsula.

U.N. deputy secretary-general Jan Eliasson appealed Wednesday for dialogue and deescalation in the Ukraine crisis as he urged participants to refrain from Cold War reflexes.

Speaking to journalists after meeting members of the interim Ukrainian government in Kiev, Eliasson said it was "in everybody's interest" to find a settlement in Crimea, where pro-Moscow forces are in de facto control.

Russian Defense Minister Sergei Shoigu said Wednesday that photographs from Crimea of military vehicles with Russian numberplates and video of an armed man claiming he is Russian were a "provocation" and "nonsense."

Shoigu was responding to questions about photographs taken in Crimea that apparently show off-road vehicles used by the Russian army with Russian number plates, and also video of one of the armed men patrolling a Ukrainian military base near the Russian border, who claimed "We are Russian citizens."