Trending Ukraine: escalating violence and political gridlock in the war zone

Discover the latest updates on Ukraine in trending World News as of April 29, 2016.

• The number of conflict-related casualties had risen to 30,729 in eastern Ukraine.  Fighting, often involving heavy weapons, was being reported daily, reaching levels not seen since August 2014.  More than 3 million people still needed assistance, especially those near the “contact line”. There were also a number of pressing human rights concerns, including the recent decision to ban the activities of the Mejlis, the representative body of the Crimean Tatars (Briefing Security Council on Eastern Ukraine Conflict, Assistant Secretary-General Underscores Need for Progress towards Political Settlement, UN)

• Nearly 10,000 people have been killed and more than 20,000 wounded since the Ukraine conflict began in April 2014, a top United Nations official said Thursday (The New York Times).

• Violations of a tense cease-fire in eastern Ukraine between Kyiv and Russian-backed rebels have reached “alarming numbers” not seen in months, international monitors told the U.N. Security Council on Thursday (Voice of America).

• The international envoy working in Minsk to bring peace to eastern Ukraine says agreement has been reached to observe a cease-fire with the start of the Orthodox Easter and May Day holidays (Associated Press).

• Just outside the western Ukrainian village of Kukhitska Volya, the dense forest turns into a moonscape of mud-filled craters and mutilated trees. The locals call the place a “Klondike,” an illegal mine where hundreds of men and women dig amber (Ladka Mortkowitz Bauerova, Kateryna Choursina, Bloomberg).

• Kiev-based Hromadske.TV is the symbol of the info wars between Moscow and the Western world, a war that the West claims it is losing to the big guns in Moscow. According to their financial report for the year ending 2015, they have nearly a dozen foreign backers. Some long term, some more fly-by-night (Kenneth Rapoza, Forbes).

• The McDonald’s fast food chain said its lawyers were investigating after entrepreneurs in separatist-controlled eastern Ukraine started selling McDonald’s-style hamburgers out of a restaurant that the company shut down two years ago (Fortune).

Maria Nesheva, EMPR