WASHINGTON: President Barack Obama is holding a video conference with European leaders to discuss their push for peace in Ukraine and other global security issues.

The leaders of Ukraine, Russia, France and Germany have agreed to send observers to flash point sites in eastern Ukraine as sporadic deadly attacks continue to rattle a shaky truce, Kiev said Tuesday.

Ukraine’s Foreign Minister Pavlo Klimkin described the situation on the ground as “very difficult and tense,” three weeks after a peace roadmap was hammered out in Minsk.

Kiev’s military spokesman Andriy Lysenko said three soldiers had been killed and nine injured in the past 24 hours, but did not say where.

Since the Feb. 12 truce, Ukrainian President Petro Poroshenko, Russian President Vladimir Putin, German Chancellor Angela Merkel and French President Francois Hollande have spoken a number of times on shoring up the cease-fire, including implementation of one of the key conditions — the withdrawal of heavy weapons from the frontline.

In a readout of their latest conversation issued by the Ukrainian presidency, the four leaders behind the cease-fire “supported Ukraine’s suggestion to send monitors to all locations of cease-fire violations.”

The intensified monitoring by the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe would start with 10 flash points, including the Donetsk airport area which fell to the pro-Russian separatists in January after months of deadly combat.

The offices of Hollande, Merkel, and Putin called for greater OSCE involvement and suggested that the monitoring mission publish a daily report on its observations.

Merkel’s spokesman Steffen Seibert said the leaders “agreed that the OSCE should play a more important role in monitoring the cease-fire and the withdrawal of weapons.”

The French presidency noted “progress” in the implementation of the cease-fire but said that the situation in eastern Ukraine — where more than 6,000 people have died since April — needed to be improved.

The UN said Monday there had been “merciless devastation of civilian lives and infrastructure” in Ukraine and that more than 6,000 people had been killed and over one million displaced.