Both Ukrainian forces and Russian-backed rebels have pulled back most of their heavy artillery from the front line in accordance with a February ceasefire deal, Ukraine’s president said late Monday, amid reports of fresh clashes in the east. However Ukraine's President Petro Poroshenko told a state broadcaster that some heavy weaponry remains in place at the airport in the rebel-held city of Donetsk. World leaders hope the withdrawal of heavy weapons as agreed at high-level peace talks last month will help bring a definitive end to the conflict, which the UN estimates has killed more than 6,000 people and displaced almost 1.8 million. The pullback is being overseen by hundreds of monitors from the Organization for Security and Co-operation in Europe (OSCE), which has in the past cited a lack of cooperation on both sides. Poroshenko said in his interview that exchanges of artillery and rocket fire have largely stopped along the 485-kilometre (300-mile) front.

Hungary's foreign minister says his country has asked the International Criminal Court (ICC) to investigate the ‘brutal actions’ committed against Christians by the Islamic State group. Minister Péter Szijjártó said it was crucial for the Netherlands-based ICC to ‘prosecute the perpetrators’ of the anti-Christian violence ‘with rigour’. Islamic State militants have been beheading Christians, including at least 21 Egyptian Copts last month in Libya, after they refused to abandon their faith in Jesus Christ. Szijjártó's remarks came while concerns remained on Tuesday, 3 March, over more than 200 Christians abducted in Syria last week, the latest in a series of known kidnappings by the group. The minister said he spoke this week of Hungary's concerns about the crackdown on Christians during a session of the United Nations Human Rights Council in Geneva. Prime Minister Viktor Orbán has said his nation needs new, tougher rules allowing for the detention and expulsion of illegal migrants, otherwise Hungary would ‘turn into a refugee camp.’

Discrimination against Christians is being ‘ignored’ by governments and courts, MPs from across Europe have warned in the wake of a string of cases involving the rights of British workers to wear crosses or discuss their beliefs. The parliamentary arm of the Council of Europe has issued a formal declaration urging states to recognise the principle of ‘reasonable accommodation’ for the beliefs of traditionalist Christians on issues such as homosexuality for the first time. The first test of the new call will come as early as this week with the opening of an employment tribunal case involving a London nursery worker who claims she was dismissed for telling a lesbian colleague her beliefs on same-sex marriage. She also alleges that she was asked to act against her beliefs by reading stories about same-sex couples to children.

Almost one in five Dutch doctors would consider helping someone die even if they had no physical problems but were ‘tired of living’, according to one of the most comprehensive academic studies of such attitudes. The research, in which almost 1,500 GPs, geriatric care doctors and clinical specialists answered a detailed, anonymous survey, also found that 2% of them said they had taken part in such euthanasia or assisted suicide without medical grounds for a patient who was suffering, even though this is prohibited under Dutch law. The paper, published in the Journal of Medical Ethics, also found that 40% of the doctors said it was conceivable they would help someone in the early stages of dementia to die, while 3% had done so. Just over a third said they might also be willing to assist people with a psychiatric disease who wished to end their life.