MOSCOW, April 9. /TASS/. More than 3,000 citizens of the self-proclaimed Donetsk People’s Republic have died and over 2,200 others have gone missing since the start of the combat actions in eastern Ukraine, the DPR’s human rights commissioner’s press service said on Thursday.
"According to official data only, over the whole period of combat actions in the region, 3,127 people have been killed, including 48 children aged under 18," the Donetsk news agency quoted the spokesperson as saying.
The Donetsk republic’s health ministry and medical forensic agency said that since January 1, 2015 a total of 876 people have died, including 13 children aged under 18, 137 women and 726 men. Since the start of the year, 722 people have been hospitalized with gunshot and fragmentation wounds, the press service said.
As of January 9, 1,732 people have been officially confirmed as missing in the Donetsk People’s Republic. Since January, another 498 people, including 327 civilians and 171 militias, have been registered as missing or detained for no reason.
The fate of many people who left the self-proclaimed republic remains unknown as "people who have no relation to the conflict are increasingly frequently held on the territory controlled by Kiev under a vain pretext," it said.
Almost 9,500 infrastructure facilities on the territory of the Donetsk republic have been damaged or ruined and the total damage exceeds 1.5 billion hryvnias ($64 million), the spokesperson said.
According to the United Nations data, between mid-April 2014 and February 28, 2015, a total of 5,809 people have died and another 14,740 people have been injured in Ukraine.
As there is yet no data on the victims of recent fighting at the Donetsk airport and Debaltsevo, the Office of the United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights (OHCHR) believes that the total death toll is over 6,000.
As of late January, the number of internally displaced persons in Ukraine reached 610,000, the OHCHR said. More than 800,000 refugees have been registered in Russia, according to Russia’s Federal Migration Service as of January 20, 2015.