Berlin, April 22, (dpa/GNA) – The war in Ukraine has made the situation for refugees around the world much more difficult, a representative of the UN Refugee Agency (UNHCR) has said.

“The conflict has further worsened the situation of many of the approximately 84 million displaced people on earth, as food has already become scarcer and significantly more expensive worldwide,” the acting UNHCR office director in Germany, Roland Bank, said in remarks published by the Funke media group in Germany on Friday.

Millions of people had already lost their incomes due to the pandemic and resulting economic repercussions and barely had the necessities needed to live, Bank added.

Now food prices have risen everywhere, sometimes drastically. Rising fuel prices also pose new challenges for humanitarian groups and for the work of the UNHCR, Bank said.

As of Friday, the UNHCR’s tally of the number of people who have fled Ukraine stood at 5.08 million. At 2.8 million, Poland has received the most of any neighbouring country, followed by Romania, Russia, Hungary and Moldova.

But Poland’s border guards lately have been counting more entries into Ukraine than exits from its eastern neighbour. On Thursday, 23,600 people left Poland for Ukraine, the border agency announced on Twitter on Friday. In contrast, 19,300 people entered Poland from Ukraine in the same period, 11% fewer than the previous day.

According to the authorities, most of the Ukrainian returnees were Ukrainian citizens travelling to areas recaptured from Russia.

There is no official information on how many war refugees have stayed in Poland and how many have travelled on to other EU states. Germany, for instance, has taken in nearly 370,000, officials said.

Another UN agency, the International Organization for Migration (IOM), puts the number of internally displaced Ukrainians at over 7.7 million, or 17% of the country’s population.

According to Ukrainian data, almost three-quarters of all people have now left the Ukrainian-controlled part of the embattled Donetsk region in the east of the country.

The information was provided by the governor of the Donetsk region, Pavlo Kyrylenko, on Ukrainian Unity TV, the online newspaper Ukrajinska Pravda reported on Friday.

According to the report, there are still around 430,000 inhabitants in the area. Before the Russian war of aggression began on February 24, there were more than 1.6 million people living there.

In Kramatorsk, the second-largest city under Ukrainian control in Donetsk after Mariupol, only a little more than 40,000 of the original 200,000 people were still living there.
GNA

Berlin, April 22, (dpa/GNA) – The war in Ukraine has made the situation for refugees around the world much more difficult, a representative of the UN Refugee Agency (UNHCR) has said.

“The conflict has further worsened the situation of many of the approximately 84 million displaced people on earth, as food has already become scarcer and significantly more expensive worldwide,” the acting UNHCR office director in Germany, Roland Bank, said in remarks published by the Funke media group in Germany on Friday.

Millions of people had already lost their incomes due to the pandemic and resulting economic repercussions and barely had the necessities needed to live, Bank added.

Now food prices have risen everywhere, sometimes drastically. Rising fuel prices also pose new challenges for humanitarian groups and for the work of the UNHCR, Bank said.

As of Friday, the UNHCR’s tally of the number of people who have fled Ukraine stood at 5.08 million. At 2.8 million, Poland has received the most of any neighbouring country, followed by Romania, Russia, Hungary and Moldova.

But Poland’s border guards lately have been counting more entries into Ukraine than exits from its eastern neighbour. On Thursday, 23,600 people left Poland for Ukraine, the border agency announced on Twitter on Friday. In contrast, 19,300 people entered Poland from Ukraine in the same period, 11% fewer than the previous day.

According to the authorities, most of the Ukrainian returnees were Ukrainian citizens travelling to areas recaptured from Russia.

There is no official information on how many war refugees have stayed in Poland and how many have travelled on to other EU states. Germany, for instance, has taken in nearly 370,000, officials said.

Another UN agency, the International Organization for Migration (IOM), puts the number of internally displaced Ukrainians at over 7.7 million, or 17% of the country’s population.

According to Ukrainian data, almost three-quarters of all people have now left the Ukrainian-controlled part of the embattled Donetsk region in the east of the country.

The information was provided by the governor of the Donetsk region, Pavlo Kyrylenko, on Ukrainian Unity TV, the online newspaper Ukrajinska Pravda reported on Friday.

According to the report, there are still around 430,000 inhabitants in the area. Before the Russian war of aggression began on February 24, there were more than 1.6 million people living there.

In Kramatorsk, the second-largest city under Ukrainian control in Donetsk after Mariupol, only a little more than 40,000 of the original 200,000 people were still living there.
GNA