Uzbekistan's President Uzbekistan's President Islam Karimov on Wednesday praised the outcome of the Ukrainian presidential election as promoting peace and calming "waves of fear" in other former Soviet states.

"The elections in Ukraine demonstrated that the majority of voters chose peace and stability in their country. They chose a united Ukraine," Karimov told reporters in the Uzbek capital of Tashkent.

The bustling eastern Ukrainian hub of Donetsk resembled a ghost town Wednesday with shuttered stores and deserted streets after a devastating two-day firefight with separatists who had seized the airport.

The gleaming Sergei Prokofiev International Airport -- rebuilt at a cost of $900 million (660 million euros) for the Euro 2012 football championship -- stood with its vast glass facade shattered after the army used fighter bombers and helicopters to attack more than 100 pro-Russian militants who had captured the building on Monday.

The OSCE said Wednesday it had no news of a four-member team gone missing in crisis-torn Ukraine and might consider pulling out of the country if the situation got worse.

"We don't their exact whereabouts but they are, according to everything one can surmise, in the hands of some rebel, separatist groups," German diplomat Wolfgang Ischinger, the OSCE's negotiator for Ukraine, told German ZDF public TV.

Russian President Vladimir Putin id due to meet his French counterpart Francois Hollande for Ukraine talks on the eve of events marking the D-Day anniversary, a Kremlin aide said Wednesday.

"The meeting will take place in the evening of June 5 in Paris at the Elysee Palace. The sides will discuss various multilateral international questions including the Ukraine crisis," presidential aide Yury Ushakov told journalists, the Interfax news agency reported.

A Polish Catholic priest has been abducted by pro-Russia militiamen in the eastern Ukrainian flashpoint city of Donetsk, the government and Polish media reported Wednesday.

"Our consular services have been working on securing the release of our citizen, we are also in touch with Church officials," Foreign Minister Radoslaw Sikorski told reporters.

Ukraine's newly elected president vowed on Wednesday to quickly end an eastern revolt after a fierce army push to reclaim a major airport saw more than 40 pro-Russian rebels killed.

The deserted streets of the million-strong rust belt city of Donetsk echoed with bursts of morning gunfire after a devastating two-day firefight in which Ukrainian fighter bombers flushed out more than 100 gunmen who had seized the region's most important air hub.

Ukraine moved a step further closer to visa-free travel to the EU on Tuesday when the EU's executive ruled it had put in place the required legislative reforms.

Ukraine "meets the first-phase requirements," a European Commission statement said. "The second phase where the Commission will be checking the implementation of these rules can therefore be launched."

U.N. Secretary General Ban Ki-moon on Tuesday urged Ukraine to use "exclusively peaceful means" to regain control in the east of the country from pro-Russian separatists.

"The secretary general is alarmed by the continuing violence that we have seen in the east during the weekend," Ban's spokesman Stephane Dujarric said.

Two Ukrainian journalists accused of "spying" have been taken hostage by pro-Russian separatists in the eastern district of Luhansk, the OSCE's monitoring group said Tuesday.

The two journalists and their driver were abducted on 25 May at a checkpoint in Shchastia, 24 kilometers north of Luhansk, the OSCE Special Monitoring Mission (SMM) said in a statement.

President Barack Obama called Ukraine's president-elect Petro Poroshenko on Tuesday and offered him "the full support of the United States."

Obama said the United States would assist Ukraine as Poroshenko "seeks to unify and move his country forward," the White House said.