Russian President Vladimir Putin said he believed there is sufficient good will to resolve the Karabakh conflict as he hosted Sunday the leaders of arch-foes Armenia and Azerbaijan.

At the meeting with Azerbaijan's President Ilham Aliyev and Serzh Sarkisian of Armenia, Putin expressed satisfaction that both leaders had expressed their commitment to seek a peaceful resolution of a conflict that has dragged on for a quarter of a century.

Russian President Vladimir Putin began talks on Saturday with the leaders of arch-foes Armenia and Azerbaijan after recent clashes that have left 22 soldiers dead and fueled fears that one of the bloodiest post-Soviet wars is restarting.

Putin held separate talks at his residence in Russia's southern Black Sea resort town of Sochi with Azerbaijan's President Ilham Aliyev and Serzh Sarkisian of Armenia. A trilateral meeting was due to be held on Sunday.

Russian billionaire Gennady Timchenko, who has been hit with U.S. sanctions, said Monday he and other businessmen will not be cowed by pressure from Washington into asking Vladimir Putin to change his stance over Ukraine.

In a rare wide-ranging interview to state-owned news agency ITAR-TASS, Timchenko said being put on the blacklist has been inconvenient but that he fully supports Russia's "sovereign" policy.

Turkey will hold its first presidential election next Sunday with Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan seeking to become a powerful head of state, amid fears from critics of a shift to autocratic one-man rule.

Erdogan and his Islamic-rooted Justice and Development Party (AKP) have led the country of 76 million people for over a decade but taking the presidency could see him serve two more five-year terms.

Punitive sanctions and the calling into question of a key arms control treaty with Washington have ratcheted up pressure on Russia, leaving President Vladimir Putin few palatable options to resolve the crisis in Ukraine, analysts say.

Putin might have thought he could get away with keeping the conflict simmering with a divided Europe wary of imposing tough sanctions that could plunge its own economy back into recession.

Russian President Vladimir Putin and his U.S. counterpart Barack Obama agreed during a phone call on Friday the current standoff in Ukraine was not in the interest of their countries, the Kremlin said.

"The presidents agreed that the current situation is not in the interests of either country," said a Kremlin statement.

Russian President Vladimir Putin and Australian Prime Minister Tony Abbott on Saturday discussed how an international probe could be set up into the downing of Malaysian Airlines flight MH17 in Ukraine, in which 28 Australians were killed.

The two leaders held a telephone conversation "to exchange their views on aspects of organizing an independent and objective international inquiry", the Kremlin said in a statement.

Australian troops plan to join a police contingent in helping secure the Flight MH17 crash site in Ukraine, Prime Minister Tony Abbott said Friday, while stressing the mission would be humanitarian in nature.

Abbott has been highly critical of the response on the ground to the downing of the Malaysia Airlines plane, which was carrying 298 people when it was apparently shot down in rebel-held eastern Ukraine.

Russian President Vladimir Putin's military intervention in Ukraine is fanning nationalist sentiments that could spread across the region with dangerous, unpredictable consequences, the U.S. military's top officer said Thursday.

General Martin Dempsey, the chairman of the U.S. Joint Chiefs of Staff, said Putin was pursuing an "aggressive" agenda that flouts sovereignty and seeks to address alleged grievances harbored by Moscow since the demise of the Soviet Union.

A Russian court on Thursday jailed a radical opposition leader Sergei Udaltsov to four and a half years for organizing "mass riots" ahead of Vladimir Putin's inauguration as president in 2012.

Judge Alexander Zamashnyuk sentenced both Udaltsov and his political ally Leonid Razvozzhayev to four and a half years in a corrective labor camp for organizing a rally against Putin and plotting further unrest.