KIEV, September 15. /ITAR-TASS/. Almost 40,000 refugees fleeing the country’s east elsewhere in Ukraine after a military operation began there in mid-April, have returned home, the press service of the Ukrainian State Service for Emergency Situations reported on Monday.

Most of them, 23,404 people, have returned from the Ukrainian capital Kiev, service’s head Sergei Bochkovsky said. More than 6,000 people have returned from the northeastern Kharkov region, and another 2,720 - from the southern Odessa region.

Despite a certain stabilization of the situation in some parts of the restive Donetsk and Luhansk regions, people keep fleeing their homes — up to 400 people a day, which is several times less than before.

The service puts the number of internally displaced people at 269,000 people. More than 830,000 Ukrainian refugees are currently staying in Russia, Russian Foreign Ministry spokesperson Alexander Lukashevich told a briefing last Thursday.

Clashes between troops loyal to Kiev and local militias in the self-proclaimed Donetsk and Luhansk republics have killed hundreds of civilians, brought destruction and forced hundreds of thousands to flee the area.

On September 5 the trilateral Contact Group on Ukraine (Russia, Ukraine and the OSCE) and representatives of the self-proclaimed Donetsk and Luhansk People’s republics (DPR and LPR) reached an agreement in Minsk on ceasefire in Ukraine’s embattled southeast, troops withdrawal, exchange of prisoners and provision of humanitarian aid.