Conflicts & War

Over a million people have returned to Ukraine, authorities say

Geneva/Kyiv, Apr 20 (EFE).- Around 1.1 million people, who had escaped Ukraine as a result of the Russian invasion, have returned to the country, Ukrainian authorities reported on Wednesday.

“In recent weeks, we have seen a certain increase in the number of Ukrainian citizens returning home,” Andriy Demchenko, spokesman for Ukraine’s State Border Guard Service, told the Kyiv-based news agency Unian.

“They are no longer mostly men, but also women, children and elderly,” he added.

These are “citizens who actually escaped the war before, and now they see that the situation in the western regions is more or less calm, and they want to be at home,” Demchenko said.

The United Nations High Commission for Refugees, meanwhile, said that more than five million people have left Ukraine since Russia launched its invasion of the eastern European nation.

Some 20,000 people have left Ukraine in the past 24 hours, according to the UN agency’s daily update.

Some 2.8 million Ukrainian residents, more than half of the total number of exiles, have fled to neighboring Poland, while the rest have made it into Romania and Hungary, among other European countries.

A further 7.1 million people have been internally displaced within Ukraine, the International Organisation for Migration (IOM) reported.

abc-int-jam/smq/ch

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