Shelling in eastern Ukraine's rebel-held eastern regions killed five people over the past 24 hours, local authorities said Saturday, in the latest deadly violations of a ceasefire.

"As a result of military actions in Donetsk on October 10, three civilians died and four more were injured and hospitalized," said the mayor's office in Donetsk, the largest eastern city.

From an empty flat overlooking the shattered remains of eastern Ukraine's biggest airport, Givi is leading an all-out assault against the last government outpost in the main pro-Russian stronghold.

The camouflage-clad guerrilla, a Russian tricolour on his arm, heads one of two units tasked with flushing out government soldiers from a site at the heart of the six-month war, which has already claimed 3,400 lives.

Medical experts have now identified 272 of the 298 people aboard the Malaysia Airlines flight MH17 shot down in Ukraine in July, the Dutch justice ministry said Friday.

Ten more people were identified this week of whom seven held Dutch nationality, the ministry said in a statement, adding that their relatives would be informed.

Ukraine's president on Friday fired a millionaire businessman who failed to stop the advance of pro-Russian rebels while governor of war-torn Donetsk and replaced him with a hardline nationalist general.

Sergiy Taruta was one of several pro-Western tycoons put in charge of restless Russian-speaking provinces after the revolution that ousted a Kremlin-backed president in February.

Three Ukrainian civilians died overnight in mortar fire around Donetsk airport, where government forces held out against pro-Russian rebels in the latest deadly violation of a ceasefire, officials said Friday.

The Donetsk mayor's office said the clashes, in which five people were wounded, lasted nine hours.

Former Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev was on Friday discharged from a Moscow clinic where he had been admitted for medical tests.

"I am feeling better today than I was yesterday. That is why doctors agreed that it was possible to allow me to leave the clinic," Gorbachev, 83, told the Interfax news agency.

Ukraine's president approved a disputed anti-graft measure on Thursday that could see up to a million civil servants with alleged links to past Soviet or pro-Russian governments immediately sacked.

The so-called "lustration law" follows the example of other eastern European nations that broke free of decades of Moscow's domination at the end of the Cold War.

The Red Cross said Thursday it was analyzing how to resume its Ukraine operations a week after halting work in the conflict-torn country following the death of a Swiss staffer.

"We are still deeply shocked by the death of our colleague Laurent Du Pasquier.... We are grieving," said Dominik Stillhart, director of operations at the International Committee of the Red Cross.

One of the people on the Malaysia Airlines flight MH17 shot down in Ukraine in July was found wearing an oxygen mask, the Dutch foreign minister and prosecutors said, raising the possibility that some passengers might have known their plane was doomed.

"You know that somebody was discovered wearing an oxygen mask and had time to put it on," Foreign Minister Frans Timmermans told a talk show on national television late Wednesday.

U.S. Secretary of State John Kerry will meet his Russian counterpart Sergei Lavrov next week in Paris with issues from Ukraine to Syria set to top the agenda.