Last year was the safest ever for commercial aviation despite high-profile incidents such as the disappearance of Flight MH370, but the industry is still working on new technologies to improve its record, IATA chief said Monday.

While more people died in air accidents in 2014 than in previous years, the rate of fatalities per flight dropped to its lowest point on record, the aviation body said. 

Yana Manuilova cuts an imposing figure in combat fatigues as a gun-toting rebel in eastern Ukraine.

But to mark International Women's Day she took time out from the war to zip herself into an evening gown and compete in a beauty pageant in the rebel stronghold of Donetsk.

Ukraine said on Sunday that one soldier has been killed in the country's east by pro-Russia separatists but that the EU-mediated ceasefire was largely being observed.

"One soldier died and three were injured" since Saturday, said security spokesman Andriy Lysenko in a briefing in Kiev.

A Russian court on Sunday charged two men with the murder of opposition activist Boris Nemtsov, including an ex-police officer from Chechnya who confessed to his involvement in what investigators said was a contract killing.

Four other suspects have denied connection to the February 27 killing of Nemtsov who was shot four times in the back while walking with his girlfriend late at night along a bridge outside the Kremlin, in the most high-profile assassination of President Vladimir Putin's rule that has sent shivers through the opposition.

The media freedom situation in Crimea is getting ever worse with a "deeply disturbing" and at times violent crackdown on independent voices a year after Russia's annexation of the Black Sea peninsula, the OSCE said.

"The continuous dismantling of free media in Crimea and the crackdown on independent and critical voices is deeply disturbing and worrying," said Dunja Mijatovic, media freedom representative at the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe.

Pro-Russian rebels in eastern Ukraine claimed Saturday to have completed their withdrawal of heavy weapons, in line with a February ceasefire deal.

"Today is the last day of the weapons withdrawal," Eduard Basurin, one of the rebel leaders told reporters in the town of Snizhne, where the separatists presented eight 120mm mortars removed from the frontline.

NATO member Poland will train Ukrainian military instructors as it has better facilities than those of its non-allied eastern neighbor, a Polish government spokesperson said Friday.

The announcement came on the heels of a meeting Friday in Warsaw between Polish Prime Minister Ewa Kopacz and Ukrainian National Security and Defense Council chief Oleksandr Turchynov.

Russia and Germany on Friday urged the OSCE, which is charged with monitoring a ceasefire in eastern Ukraine, to double the number of observers in the country to 1,000, Moscow said.

The Russian foreign ministry said that the country's top diplomat Sergei Lavrov and his German counterpart Frank-Walter Steinmeier had called for intensified efforts by the Organization for Security and Co-operation in Europe in monitoring the fragile truce.

Ukrainian pilot Nadiya Savchenko has decided to end a hunger strike after going more than 80 days without food to protest her detention in a Russian jail, one of her lawyers said on Friday.

"She has taken the decision," lawyer Mark Feigin told AFP.

Kiev said Friday it had withdrawn all its Uragan multiple rocket launchers from the main conflict zone in eastern Ukraine, in compliance with a ceasefire agreement with pro-Russian rebels.

Two of the imposing Uragan (Hurricane) rocket launchers -- equipped with 16 launch tubes for 220mm rockets -- were being readied for loading on to a train alongside at least ten howitzer cannons in the eastern town of Artemivsk, an AFP photographer reported.