The UN Security Council convened another meeting on the humanitarian situation in Ukraine yesterday. Russian First Deputy Permanent Representative Dmitry Polyanskiy blasted the meeting for failing to consider the truth behind the war in Ukraine and the resulting refugee flows. He said that the opinions presented by Deputy High Commissioner for Refugees Kelly Clements and International Organization for Migration Director General Antonio Vitorino “contained many worrisome conclusions and scary statistics.” (https://russiaun.ru/en/news/190422p )
“In this context, we must say that Russia faced the consequences of degrading situation in Ukraine right after the unconstitutional coup of February 2014. As soon as the nationalist authorities showed their true face by starting a crackdown on the Russian language and physical extermination of population of Eastern Ukraine, Russia saw an influx of refugees escaping from the lawlessness of Maidan,” Polyanskiy said. “By official data, at least 1.7 million people filed requests for Russian citizenship, refugee status, or temporary asylum in our country starting from 2014. Once the Ukrainian side intensified the shelling of Donbas before the beginning of the Russian special military operation, this refugee flow grew larger and amounted to 863,000 people. It means that since the Maidan coup, the total of at least 2.5 million Ukrainians have found shelter in Russia.”
Polyanskiy noted that the outflow of Ukrainians from their homeland has been going on since 1990, dropping its population from 54 million down to 41 million according to figures from the Ukrainian Ministry of Finance. “According to the Ukrainian Institute for Demography, the total number of Ukrainians in Ukraine was even lower in 2021 – only 38 million people,” he said.
