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Five Ukrainian soldiers killed, four wounded in separatist east

Five Ukrainian soldiers have been killed and four wounded in fresh clashes with pro-Russian separatists in the country’s east, the military said Sunday, the army’s second deadliest toll this year.

“Unfortunately, over the past 24 hours, five Ukrainian soldiers have died and four more have been wounded,” military spokesman Oleksandr Motuzyanyk told reporters.

It was the second biggest death toll in a single day this year for the army after the military reported on Tuesday that seven government troops had died in the east of the country.

The villages of Avdiivka and Opytne located close to the rebels’ de-facto capital of Donetsk remain the epicentre of the fighting, said Motuzyanyk.

The latest deaths came after Kiev said on Saturday that another Ukrainian soldier had died in clashes with rebels near the government-controlled city of Mariupol.

“The situation has worsened sharply,” another military spokesman, Andriy Lysenko, told journalists on Saturday.

On Monday, the leaders of France, Germany, Russia and Ukraine called for the 2015 peace accords signed in the Belarussian capital Minsk to be implemented “as quickly as possible,” according to the French presidency.

The accords call for a ceasefire along with a range of political, economic and social measures to end the conflict which erupted in April 2014 and has now claimed more than 9,300 lives.

But persistent violence is preventing the warring sides from reaching a political reconciliation deal despite a series of truce agreements.

The latest spike in violence came after Ukraine scored a major diplomatic victory on Wednesday by securing the return of Ukrainian military pilot Nadiya Savchenko as part of a prisoner swap with the Kremlin.

– Savchenko meets Poroshenko –

Some observers expressed the hope that the high-profile Savchenko prisoner swap would help reduce tensions between the two rivals and speed up the implementation of Western-brokered agreements to reach peace in the east of the ex-Soviet country.

Ukrainian President Petro Poroshenko received Savchenko — who was fighting in a pro-Kiev militia group against rebels in east Ukraine before she was captured by Russia in June 2014 — late on Saturday.

The two discussed the exacerbation of violence in the east, with Poroshenko asking the 35-year-old Iraq war veteran “to visit a number of European countries and hold meetings with European leaders.”

Savchenko, who had been held in Russia for nearly two years, was convicted by a Russian court in March over the killing of two Russian journalists in eastern Ukraine and sentenced to 22 years behind bars.

The West and Kiev have accused Russia of buttressing the rebels and sending regular troops across the border, claims Moscow has repeatedly denied despite evidence to the contrary.