THE UNITED NATIONS, October 24. /TASS/. The Minsk agreements on the promotion of Ukraine’s peace process are effective, but the peace process is fragile, UN Assistant Secretary-General for Human Rights Ivan Simonovic told TASS on Friday.

Simonovic said the ceasefire today is the best foundation for the conflict’s peaceful settlement. He said the ceasefire agreement has caused a four-fold decrease in the mortality rate that eastern Ukraine had during hostilities.

“The truce is fragile and although the average number of killed has decreased from 42 people per day during the weeks preceding the agreement to 9 people since then, the situation is still tense and human rights violations are committed by all the sides,” he said.

The UN assistant secretary-general welcomed the exchange of prisoners between the sides under the Minsk agreements. All the sides must do everything possible to ensure observance of the agreement, he said.

According to the UN data as of October 15, the death toll from the armed conflict between government forces and self-defense militias in eastern Ukraine has reached 3,707. The United Nations Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs (OCHA) reported on October 17 that 25 more people died in the past week. The OCHA said 9,075 people have been wounded in eastern Ukraine in the past six months of fighting. The report says other organizations report a higher death toll.

According to the OCHA reports, some 842,000 people in Ukraine have fled the fighting, with roughly half of them going to Russia and the rest displaced in Ukraine.