The number of internally displaced persons in Ukraine is nearing 20,000, a spokesperson for the UN Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs said on Monday, June 16.
He said 19,000 people had been identified as internally displaced people in Ukraine.
Earlier in the day, Under-Secretary-General for Humanitarian Affairs Valerie Amos referred to 17,500 displaced people in Ukraine. The difference in estimates may be due to the rapidly changing situation in the country.
At the same time, the actual number of internally displaced people in Ukraine may reach 34,000. Amos quoted trustworthy sources as saying that the movement of people was registered in the eastern Donetsk and Luhansk regions, and 15,000 people had fled the city of Sloviansk alone. However these numbers provided by the local authorities have not yet been included in the UN official statistics.
The United Nations last published such data in late May when the number of internally displaced persons in Ukraine was 10,000.
Amos could not say how many people had crossed from Ukraine into neighboring Russia.
Meanwhile, Russian regions are getting ready for a surge in the flow of refugees from the south-east of Ukraine. Over the past month, more than 122,000 refugees from Ukraine have entered the Rostov region alone, and 70,000 of them decided to stay in Russia.
[GENEVA, June 16. /ITAR-TASS]
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Lyudmila Denisenko endured weeks of deadly shootouts between Ukrainian forces and pro-Russian insurgents in her home city of Slovyansk, the epicenter of the separatist conflict ravaging eastern Ukraine....
ReplyDeleteBut when a children's hospital was shelled two weeks ago, her patience finally snapped.
She and her family fled for the relative safety of Izyum, a small town 50 kilometers northwest of Slovyansk.
"We came here with nothing," she recently told RFE/RL in Izyum's City Hall, where she was applying for temporary accommodation and basic supplies. "We could no longer stay. The children's hospital was bombed, the train station was bombed, the bus station was bombed. We hitchhiked all the way here."
Like Denisenko, thousands of people have fled eastern Ukraine in recent weeks.
Amid the chaos, however, the scope of the refugee crisis remains unclear.
UNHCR, the United Nations' refugee agency, estimates that there are currently more than 17,500 internally displaced people (IDPs) in Ukraine.
About 11,000 of these are former Crimea residents who fled the peninsula after its annexation by Russia in March. The rest are eastern Ukrainians forced out of their homes by the separatist conflict.
"The majority are women and children, about one third are children," says Oldrich Andrysek, the agency's representative for Belarus, Moldova, and Ukraine. "There are relatively few old people, pensioners. They are reluctant to leave their homes even though conditions are very bad."
Rough estimates
The flow of refugees appears to have intensified since the government launched what it calls an "antiterrorist operation" to root out separatists from eastern Ukraine in mid-April.
Their real number is probably much higher than UNHCR's estimates, which don't include people who turned to nongovernmental groups for help or are waiting out the conflict with relatives.
"Our figure is collated from local authorities after they've been approached for some kind of assistance, it's a very incomplete figure because there is no central register of displaced persons," says Andrysek. "It's a rough estimate. The figure could be double, but it's very hard to confirm."
In addition to IDPs, some of those displaced by the turmoil in Ukraine have sought refuge abroad.
According to UNHCR, more than 440 Ukrainian citizens have applied for asylum in Poland since the beginning of the year. As of June 13, it says, 22 have sought asylum in Belarus and another 19 in Moldova...........................http://www.voanews.com/content/in-focus-ukraines-refugee-crisis/1937851.html