Internally displaced persons in Ukraine (since 2014)

Forced migrants in Ukraine (since 2014) are internal migrants in the country who migrated there from the territory of the ATO ( armed conflict in eastern Ukraine ), also include migrants from Crimea , annexed in February – March 2014 to the Russian Federation .

According to a statement by the official representative of the Russian Foreign Ministry, Maria Zakharova, the total number of Ukrainian citizens who are in Russia as of March 16, 2017 is 2 million 300 thousand 320 people, of which more than a million are refugees from Donbass ^[1] .

On June 15, 2016, the Deputy Minister for Occupied Territories and Internally Displaced Persons, Georgy Tuka , said that the real number of migrants from Donbass is about 800 thousand - this estimate was given according to an independent study conducted by international organizations ^[2] . At the same time, according to the Ministry of Social Policy, the number of registered migrants is more than 1.7 million people (as of February 1, 2016). Of this number, more than 714 thousand families applied for state financial assistance, which was assigned to more than 669 thousand families ^{[2] [3]} .

According to the data provided by the British publication The Telegraph in June 2016, 100 thousand people left the territory of Crimea. Moreover, approximately 21 thousand people are officially registered in the country as “internally displaced persons” from Crimea ^[4] .

According to the statement of the People’s Deputy of Ukraine Mustaf Dzhemilev in May 2015, at that time about 35 thousand people left Crimea, of which more than 20 thousand were Crimean Tatars . The latter, according to him, settled mainly in the western regions of Ukraine ^[5] .

According to the Ministry of Social Policy, as of September 14, 2015, 1,483,119 internally displaced persons (or more than a million families) from the Donbass and Crimea were registered ^[6] .

According to the UN , for the year of the military conflict in eastern Ukraine (mid-April 2015), the number of internally displaced persons amounted to 1,228,090, of which 154,635 were children ^[7] .

As of March 2015, the State Service for Emergency Situations registered about 777 thousand IDPs from the ATO and Crimea zones. “This number includes immigrants within the Lugansk (141333 people) and Donetsk (102006 people) regions, 20305 people left the Crimea,” the State Emergency Situations reported, “Most of the internal immigrants are in Kharkov (146660 people), Dnepropetrovsk (80879 people) , Zaporizhzhya (59909 people) regions and in Kiev (39047 people). Least of all - in Ternopol (2411 people), Chernivtsi (2495 people), Ivano-Frankivsk (3167 people) and Transcarpathian (3 513 people) ” ^[8] .