Updated 8:51 p.m. Moscow time
GENEVA, October 10 (RIA Novosti) - Almost 3,700 people have been killed and over 8,800 have been wounded since the start of an armed conflict in eastern Ukraine in April, a report by the UN Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs said Friday.
According to the OCHA weekly situation report, "at least 3,682 have been killed (including 298 from flight MH17) and 8,871 wounded in eastern Ukraine as of October 8."
These totals include casualties of the Ukrainian armed forces as reported by the Ukrainian authorities, 298 people from Malaysian flight MH17 as well as casualties reported by civil medical establishments and local administrations of the breakaway Donetsk and Luhansk regions.
The UN Human Rights Monitoring Mission in Ukraine and World Health Organization believe that the actual number of fatalities could be considerably higher.
The armed conflict in Ukraine's southeast started in spring when Kiev launched a military operation against independence supporters in the region. The two sides agreed on a ceasefire on September 5, at a meeting of the Contact Group on Ukraine in the Belarusian capital, Minsk. Both sides have subsequently accused each other of violating the agreement.
Malaysia Airlines flight MH17 plane crashed in Ukraine's eastern region of Donetsk on July 17. It was en route from Amsterdam to Kuala Lumpur when the accident happened. The cause of the tragedy is still unclear.
The Ukrainian government and its Western allies have claimed that anti-Kiev militia in the region downed the plane with a missile, while independence supporters in Ukraine's east insist that they do not have weapons capable of bringing down planes flying at a higher altitudes.
