The government’s press office for the operation in the east said it recorded an increase in fighting on several fronts on Sunday which left at least five killed and nine troops injured. Ukrainian military spokesman Oleksandr Motuzyanyk said troops had repelled an early-morning attack by rebels seeking to storm their positions in Avdiyivka's industrial zone. Nearly 10,000 people — more than half of them civilians — have been killed in fighting that erupted in April 2014, a month after Russia unilaterally annexed Ukraine's Crimea peninsula, and two months after lengthy pro-Western protests in Kyiv forced Ukraine's pro-Russian president into exile. The latest clashes come ahead of a visit by President Petro Poroshenko to Berlin on Monday to discuss the state of the conflict with Chancellor Angela Merkel, who helped broker the much-violated Minsk peace deal.
The Ukrainian military says seven soldiers have been killed by pro-Russian separatists since Sunday. The separatists report over 5 days of artillery attacks on them by the Ukrainian side.