Turkey said Friday it will send and "informal mission" to Crimea to monitor what it termed the "oppression" of Crimean Tatars, an ethnic group that opposed Russia's 2014 seizure of the Black Sea peninsula.

"We are sending an informal mission to observe the human rights violations in Crimea soon," Turkey's Foreign Minister Mevlut Cavusoglu told reporters in Lithuania.

With heavily-armed men patrolling the streets, shootings in the dark of night and the echo of gunfire from the airport, life is far from normal in the east Ukraine city of Donetsk weeks after the signing of a ceasefire.

On a day like any other, huge trucks transporting armored vehicles ply the streets, pro-Russian rebels tooled up with Kalashnikovs and ammunition browse supermarket aisles and vehicles are pulled up at checkpoints to be searched before entering town.

Ukraine's beleaguered forces have faced problems all of their own making as they've failed to retake separatist territories during a year of conflict -- poor leadership, few supplies, bad coordination.

But the main reason Kiev has struggled to reclaim the rebel regions, some analysts in the West and Ukraine say, is that it has been facing off against thousands of regular Russian troops that Moscow poured in to bolster the insurgency despite blanket denials from the Kremlin.  

Russia launched Wednesday a probe into tax fraud against a candy factory owned by Ukrainian President Petro Poroshenko and conducted a search of its premises.

Roshen, the company owned by the Ukrainian leader, denounced the raid as illegal, in the latest spat between arch-foes Moscow and Kiev, which is battling a pro-Russian insurgency in its eastern regions.

Russian authorities on Wednesday shut down a television channel serving Crimean Tatars, an ethnic group that opposed Moscow's seizure of Crimea, sparking concern in Ukraine and the West.

ATR television channel was forced off air after Russia's state media regulator refused to give it a broadcasting license. 

On a deserted road in east Ukraine, a missile strike briefly became the focus of the propaganda war that rages unabated despite the lull in fighting between pro-Russian rebels and the government.

A ceasefire has tamped down much of the violence for weeks now but both sides are desperate to blame each other for any isolated clashes that violate the truce.

The year-long conflict in east Ukraine has closed businesses across this industrial heartland, ramping up unemployment, crippling finances and leaving it ever more reliant on Moscow. 

Fierce fighting between government forces and pro-Russian rebels has ravaged a region that once provided 25 percent of the nation's exports and has shorn Kiev of a vital source of foreign currency, seeing the Ukrainian economy contract sharply. 

A top U.S. lawmaker in Kiev on Tuesday urged President Barack Obama to provide arms to Ukraine, calling its conflict with pro-Russian separatists "the most significant threat to peace...since the end of WWII."

William "Mac" Thornberry, Chairman of the House Committee on Armed Services, met with Ukrainian President Petro Poroshenko and said he hoped to convince Obama to heed a recent Congress vote overwhelmingly calling for the supply of defensive weapons.

The Council of Europe on Tuesday blasted Kiev for failing to properly investigate deadly violence against demonstrators in last year's Maidan protests that ended with pro-Russian president Viktor Yanukovych's downfall.

The pan-European rights organization said Ukrainian probes into the bloody crackdown that killed scores of people "failed to satisfy the requirements of the European Convention of Human Rights".

A summit between top European Union officials and Ukraine's leaders will take place in Kiev at the end of April, Ukraine President Petro Poroshenko announced on Saturday.

The summit comes amid a shaky ceasefire between Kiev forces and pro-Russian separatists in the country's east, which came into force on February 15.