German Chancellor Angela Merkel says everything must be done to fully implement a cease-fire agreement in eastern Ukraine.
She was speaking in Berlin on August 24 at a joint news conference in Berlin with French President Francois Hollande and Ukrainian President Petro Poroshenko.
She said the peace deal reached in Minsk in February "hasn't been fully implemented and that's meant that there have been more and more victims."
Poroshenko reiterated that "there is no alternative to the Minsk process."
Earlier in Kyiv, Poroshenko marked Ukraine's Independence Day, warning of the need to act carefully in the next year in the face of "Russian aggression."
More than 6,400 people have been killed in fighting between Ukrainian government forces and Russian-backed separatists in Ukraine's east since April 2014.