GENEVA
Some 430,000 people have been driven from their homes in Ukraine since the crisis in the country began, the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees said on Friday.
"Fighting in the east, and the resulting breakdown of basic services, continues to drive more people from their homes," spokesman for the relief agency Adrian Edwards said at a press conference in UN headquarters in Geneva.
"The number of internally displaced has increased by 170,000 since the start of September," Edwards warned.
Edwards said the agency will help the most vulnerable displaced people cope with expected harsh winter conditions.
"The need for humanitarian aid is rising, particularly around the cities of Donetsk, Kharkiv and Kyiv, and in the Dnipropetrovsk and Zaporizhzia regions," he said.
"As of the end of September, more than 6,600 Ukrainians had requested asylum in European Union countries, compared with 903 applications during the whole of 2013," the agency said in a statement.
Poland has received 1,632 Ukrainian asylum seekers, followed by Sweden with 841 and Belarus with 581, the agency said.
www.aa.com.tr/en
