MOSCOW, July 15. /ITAR-TASS/. Over 24,000 of forced Ukrainian refugees, who fled their country amid the ongoing armed conflict, remain in Russia’s temporary asylums, a spokesman for the Russian Emergencies Ministry said on Tuesday.

“A total of 348 temporary asylums were set up on the territory of Russia accommodating 24,125 refugees, with seven of the asylums set up within the past 24 hours,” Alexander Drobyshevsky said.

The spokesman added that the Emergencies Ministry’s medical personnel continuously rendering assistance to all refugees, who require medical attendance.

“Over the past 24 hours, specialists from the mobile hospital of the Southern search and rescue detachment rendered medical assistance to 57 Ukrainian nationals,” Drobyshevsky said. “In all, 292 people received medical assistance so far.”

A total of 658 Ukrainian forced refugees were transported by the ministry’s rescuers to temporary asylums located in various parts of Russia over the past day.

“The Emergencies Ministry’s aviation transported 353 people, while 305 more were transported by cars over the past 24 hours,” Drobyshevsky added.

Russia’s Federal Migration Service (FMS) chief Konstantin Romodanovsky said on Monday that a total of over 30,000 Ukrainians had already applied to the service for refugee status or temporary refuge.

At a meeting with Director of the Bureau for Europe of the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees Office Vincent Cochetel on Monday, the Russian migration official said that the growing number of these applications caused special concern.

 

Disabled children cannot leave Ukraine

Over 120 disabled children from southeast Ukraine’s embattled cities of Donetsk and Luhansk cannot leave Ukraine, Russian children’s ombudsman Pavel Astakhov said on Tuesday.

Astakhov said hundreds of orphans were hostage to Ukraine’s military operation in the country’s southeast as they were neither being evacuated nor allowed to leave the besieged Luhansk and Donetsk.

“Among them, there are 120 disabled children and children with physical impairments from an orphanage for children with nervous system disorders and mental retardation,” the ombudsman said.

A family of three, including a baby, has been killed in the past twenty-four hours in Luhansk as a result of combat operations, Astakhov said.

“(Ukrainian President Petro) Poroshenko continues to ‘rid’ Luhansk of children and children’s facilities. A school has been destroyed and a school worker has been killed. Shells hit a kindergarten. A family of three with a baby was killed as they strolled in a house courtyard. Another three children with fragmentation wounds were taken to hospital in a grave condition,” the ombudsman said.

Troops loyal to Kiev and local militias in the Donetsk and Lugansk regions are involved in fierce clashes as the Ukrainian armed forces are conducting a military operation to regain control over the breakaway regions, which on May 11 proclaimed their independence at local referendums.

During its military operation conducted since mid-April, Kiev has used armored vehicles, heavy artillery and attack aviation. According to Ukraine’s Health Ministry, 478 civilians have been killed and 1,392 wounded in the armed stand-off. Many buildings have been destroyed and tens of thousands of people have had to flee Ukraine’s embattled southeast.