Nearly 1 million internally displaced in Ukraine: UN

Europe, News February 7, 2015 , by IRIA No Comments

The United Nations says about one million people have been internally displaced in Ukraine as a result of the ongoing conflict in the east of the country.

The Office of the UN High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR) said on Friday that recent figures by Ukraine’s Ministry of Social Policy show the number of those registered as Internally Displaced Persons (IDPs) across Ukraine currently stands at 980,000.

The number of people who have been forced to leave their homes in the eastern European country is expected to increase, UNHCR Spokesman Adrian Edwards told journalists in the Swiss city of Geneva while presenting the new statistics.

“As more homes and other civilian infrastructure is damaged or destroyed, the UNHCR expects more people to be displaced to areas in central, southern and western Ukraine under the control of the Ukrainian government, but also to non-government controlled areas in the Donetsk and Luhansk regions,” Edwards said.

He further warned of the situation of the recently displaced people in the former Soviet state, noting that the UN’s refugee agency has started to distribute relief items in northern areas of the Donetsk region which hosts the majority of IDPs from Ukraine’s crisis-hit areas.

The two mainly Russian-speaking regions of Donetsk and Luhansk in eastern Ukraine have been the scene of deadly clashes between pro-Russia forces and the Ukrainian army since Kiev launched military operations to silence protests there in mid-April 2014.

Violence intensified in May last year after the two flashpoint regions held local referendums in which their residents voted overwhelmingly in favor of independence from Ukraine and joining the Russian Federation.

The fighting has left over 5,300 people dead and more than 12,200 wounded, according to the UN.

SSM/NN/HRB