Ukrainian rebels today accused government forces of killing three civilians in attacks launched hours before the start of talks in Paris on ways to halt the 15-month separatist war.
Kiev's Western-backed military command reported the death of one soldier and accused the pro-Russian rebels of launching the heaviest wave of mortar and artillery fire since the start of the year in one relatively peaceful region.
The daily bloodshed and destruction of housing underscores a repeated failure by diplomats to find a way out of a crisis that has killed 6,500 people and plunged East-West relations to a post-Cold War low.
It has also pushed Russian President Vladimir Putin to seek a closer alliance with China and build up Latin American military cooperation and trade - two developments of particular concern to Washington and its own strategic plans.
Putin resolutely denies orchestrating the war to pay back Kiev for its February 2014 ouster of a Kremlin-backed leader who had ditched a landmark alliance with the European Union to instead maintain the ex-Soviet state's more traditional Russian ties.
Ukraine itself now threatens to turn into a frozen conflict that grows more deadly in the summer - a season where forests provide better cover and ground movements are easier - and cuts off cash-strapped Kiev from its main industrial base.
The insurgents reported one of the three civilian deaths in a village on the outskirts of Donetsk - a coal mine-pitted city abandoned by half its estimated million residents that insurgents have turned into their de facto capital.
Gennadiy Moskal - a respected former deputy interior minister tasked by Kiev with reining in the neighbouring separatist province of Lugansk - called counter-strikes launched by guerrillas in his own region "unlike any we have seen since the start of the year".
The violence has pushed to more than 60 the number of soldiers and civilians killed this month. The rebels usually do not report casualty figures but Kiev thinks they are bigger than the ones suffered by its own troops.
Ukrainian military spokesman Andriy Lysenko said yesterday that "we do not know their losses but they are serious".
The separatists have called the government forces' attacks a "grave" violation of the Minsk agreement that Russia and Ukraine signed during February negotiations spearheaded by the leaders of Germany and France.
The four countries' foreign ministers are due to meet in Paris later today with the hope of at least easing the bloodshed in the weeks to come.
