More than 4,000 people have been killed in fighting in eastern Ukraine between the army and pro-Russian separatists, the UN said Friday, as the Ukrainian president took steps to "unite" the country after elections.
A pro-Russia separatist repairs a damaged BMP-2 infantry fighting vehicle in the village of Lukove, eastern Ukraine, on October 29, 2014
The United Nations said in over six months there have been 4,035 deaths, more than 300 in the last 10 days alone, showing the fragility of a ceasefire reached in September.
The new UN report comes after legislative polls last weekend that elected a pro-Western government and led Ukrainian President Petro Poroshenko on Friday to back rival Arseniy Yatsenyuk as future premier in a bid for unity.
Poroshenko said his choice was dictated by the "need for the country to unite" in order to implement reforms and push Ukraine along a path towards European integration.
Yatsenyuk's People's Front has a narrow lead over Poroshenko's party according to a near final count of last Sunday's parliament polls, an unexpected result that has some observers wondering if Kiev could become paralysed by rivalry between its leaders.
Ukraine's election commission said that 99.74% of votes have been counted, however the final makeup of the Verkhovna Rada is still unclear as half of the deputies are chosen by a first-past-the-post constituency system.
The presidency said on the website that the Poroshenko Bloc has secured a total of 150 seats out of 450.
The number for the party of Yatsenyuk, Ukraine's chief negotiator at global financial institutions, is not yet known.
Poroshenko's aim is a strong pro-European coalition in parliament that can implement direly needed reforms as the war-ravaged country is faced with financial ruin and a relentless battle with pro-Russian rebels in the east.
The Ukrianian president has been unable to stop the separatist "people's republics" in the eastern Donetsk and Lugansk regions from slipping away, and they are set to hold their own polls on Sunday, a ballot decried by the West and welcomed by Moscow as the region continues to drift closer to its orbit.
- Rebels build 'legitimacy' -
"These elections are important because they will give legitimacy to our power and give us more distance from Kiev," said the election commission chief of the Donetsk People's Republic, Roman Lyagin, describing negative reactions from the West as "not constructive".
About three million ballots have been printed ahead of the polls, and some 34,000 have already voted over the Internet, Lyagin told a news conference.
Moscow this week vowed to recognise the rebel polls, with Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov saying he expects them to "go ahead as agreed".
New NATO chief Jens Stoltenberg warned Moscow Friday against such recognition, adding that statements like Lavrov's "show that Russia continues its efforts to destabilise Ukraine".
Kiev and the West have accused Russian President Vladimir Putin of sending troops across the border to help the rebels -- charges Moscow denies.
On Friday Poroshenko together with French President Francois Hollande and German Chancellor Angela Merkel urged Putin not to recognise the polls.
In the conference call, Hollande and Merkel also welcomed the breakthrough deal Kiev reached with Moscow late Thursday in Brussels to resolve their long conflict over energy supplies, and said the European Union will play its role to facilitate its implementation.
- Ukraine's gas deal -
In the agreement published by Ukraine's government, Kiev must pay the first tranche of its debt ($1.45 billion) before any gas deliveries are resumed and the full amount of $3.1 billion by the end of the year in order to receive gas in 2015.
Yatsenyuk however warned that the deal only "partly" solves Ukraine's problem and urged the public to cut down on natural gas usage in the months to come.
"We will solve the gas problem when we diversify energy sources... so that Russia does not dictate its conditions," he said.
Moscow on Friday also sent a fourth convoy of aid trucks to eastern Ukraine, defying Kiev's protests against an unsupervised mission across the border into separatist areas that it does not control.
Kiev said its border guards could only see the outside of the 76 trucks and blamed Moscow for using the convoy to "supply militants" rather than aid to the stricken civilian population.
The new UN report also said more than 930,000 people have been displaced in the rebel-held Donetsk and Lugansk regions, with nearly half a million of them fleeing to neighbouring countries, mainly to Russia.