A local resident carries a toy bear as a Ukrainian serviceman patrols near a residential building damaged during recent shelling in the Avdeevka, 5km north of Donetsk.

DPA/Moscow/Kiev

Five Ukrainian soldiers have been killed and 33 injured since a ceasefire took hold in the country’s east, the National Security and Defence Council said yesterday.

Pro-Russian separatists fired 89 times on government forces so far, but by and large the truce is holding, council spokesman Andriy Lysenko said in Kiev.

Artillery shelling was reported from Donetsk, where a woman was injured, and from areas east of the rebel-held city, local media reported.

However, Lysenko said that the situation was overall better than in previous days.

“This is the first relatively quiet day in eastern Ukraine,” Lysenko was quoted as saying by the Interfax Ukraine news agency.

The truce has been shaky since coming into force on Friday after an agreement was reached between separatists and the government at talks in Minsk, Belarus.

The agreement came after a successful offensive by the separatists that Ukraine and the West say was backed by Russian troops.

The European Union on Monday agreed on new sanctions against Russia but delayed their introduction to assess the ceasefire’s implementation.

European Union ambassadors will discuss how to proceed during a meeting in Brussels on Wednesday, said Maja Kocijancic, a spokeswoman for EU foreign policy chief Catherine Ashton.

Latvian Defence Minister Raimonds Vejonis said yesterday that he was “disappointed” with the delay.

“Russia all the time helps the separatists ... The EU must be united and implement the next stage of economic sanctions,” he said as he arrived in Milan for two days of informal talks of EU defence ministers.

But Finnish Defence Minister Carl Haglund said several member states had been concerned that sanctions would hamper the peace process.

“It would be very unwise to cause a situation where the peace process could go into the wrong direction,” he said in Milan.

Italian Foreign Minister Federica Mogherini, the EU’s foreign policy chief-in-waiting, told the parliament in Rome that the delay was warranted because “there is a need to send messages of encouragement” toward peace in Ukraine.

The Minsk agreement also promises “special status” for areas controlled by the rebels, but the separatists said yesterday that they insist on independence from Ukraine for much bigger territories, according to Russia’s Ria Novosti news agency.

“The Donetsk People’s Republic that is the whole Donetsk region and the Luhansk People’s Republic is the whole Luhansk region,” Donetsk rebel leader Alexander Zakharchenko was quoted as saying with reference to the self-declared separatist entities.

The separatists control less than half of each region’s territory.

An adviser to Ukrainian President Petro Poroshenko, Yuriy Lutsenko, said that far from granting sovereignty, the Minsk agreement only gives temporary “special status” to those districts not controlled by the government in Kiev.

“The text stipulates the formal-legal dissolution of the self-declared Luhansk and Donetsk People’s Republics,” Lutsenko said on Facebook.

Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov said that he hopes that talks about the political status of the regions will begin soon.

Separatist leaders said that they would start a new prisoner exchange with the Ukrainian government today.

Andrei Purgin, a Donetsk rebel leader, told Interfax that each side would exchange 36 prisoners.

No vaccine stocks in conflict-torn Ukraine, says WHO

Conflict-torn Ukraine is facing a health emergency, with no stocks of any vaccines and dire shortages of many medicines, the World Health Organisation (WHO) warned yesterday.

“Ukraine has no vaccines ... they don’t have any vaccines in their storage,” said Dorit Nitzan, who heads WHO’s country office in Ukraine.

“Even before the crisis they had low (immunisation) coverage,” she told reporters in Geneva, stressing that there was a dearth in Ukraine of “every kind of vaccine”.

The shortage raises deep concerns that polio could break out in Ukraine, Nitzan said, pointing out that the crippling disease that mainly hits young children “usually comes in countries in turmoil”.

The conflict in eastern Ukraine has killed more than 2,700 people and forced more than half a million people to flee their homes, according to United Nations figures.

The fighting on top of Ukraine’s already weak health system and dwindling supplies of medicines has created “a looming health emergency”, WHO warned.

The UN agency pointed out that some 7,000 people had been injured in the fighting.

At the same time, 32 hospitals are no longer fully functioning – 17 of them have been shelled and damaged – while up to 70% of health staff have fled the conflict-hit eastern areas of Donetsk and Luhansk.

The health needs in Ukraine are “immense”, Nitzan said.

The WHO said it and its partners aim to step up their health services in the country, and plan to provide medicine and medical supplies to some 340,000 people.

In mid-August, the WHO had appealed for $14mn (€11mn) to scale up its Ukraine operations.

However, has so far the WHO has received just $40,000, Nitzan said.