...the Oyster Bay money pit...
said on Tuesday.
Over 3,660 people have died and 8,766 been maimed in eastern Ukraine since fighting broke out in mid-April when armed separatists declared they were setting up their own state, the office of UN High Commissioner for Human Rights said.
The overall death rate has dropped sharply since the ceasefire began, according to the latest monthly report by the nine international monitors and 24 support staff sent in March to the former Soviet republic now at odds with Russia.
A surge in civilian casualties in late August, the report said, followed an influx of imported muscle including former or current Russian servicemen "on leave" to back up the separatists as the Ukrainian army was gaining the upper hand.
"The situation has improved since the ceasefire, but it is still concerning," Gianni Magazzini, of the office of UN High Commissioner for Human Rights Zeid Ra'ad Al Hussein, told a news conference to present the report.
Since the ceasefire was agreed in Minsk between Ukraine's President Petro Poroshenko, Russian President Vladimir Putin
...Second and fourth President and sixth of the Russian Federation and the first to remain sober. Putin is credited with bringing political stability and re-establishing something like the rule of law, which occasionally results in somebody dropping dead from polonium poisoning. Under Putin, a new group of business magnates controlling significant swathes of Russia's economy has emerged, all of whom have close personal ties to Putin. The old bunch, without close personal ties to Putin, are in jail or in exile or dead...and separatist chiefs, at least 331 deaths have been recorded in the conflict area, it said.
In a separate statement, Zeid called on both sides in the fighting - largely around the industrial and coal mining cities of Donetsk and Lugansk - to "halt the attacks on civilians and civilian infrastructure once and for all."
The report said the separatist fighters, portrayed in the Moscow media as defending their regions against a "fascist regime" in Kiev, "continue to terrorise the population in areas under their control."
The fighters, it said, were "pursuing killings, abductions and torture" and seizing property and businesses at will. They kidnapped people for ransom and forced labour or to be exchanged for their own men captured by Ukrainian forces.