Vereshchuk denies mass return of IDPs to TOT

Deputy Head of the Presidential Office Iryna Vereshchuk denies mass return of IDPs to the temporarily occupied territories.

Vereshchuk announced this on her Telegram channel, the Ukrainian News agency reports.

"Recently, some of our politicians have for some reason started making statements that internally displaced persons are returning to the TOT by the thousands. These "politicians" claim that Ukrainians are supposedly going to the occupation because, they say, the state is not helping them enough with housing, money, and work. Here's what I'll tell you, dear irresponsible hype lovers: you are lying when you say that thousands of IDPs are returning to the TOT. There are no confirmed statistics and there cannot be, this is exclusively hype for the sake of loud headlines," she noted.

Vereshchuk claims that everything the state promises by law, it does.

"Maybe this is not enough, but we are at war, and the state's resources are limited. However, this is not a reason to go to the enemy occupation. I will never believe that thousands of Ukrainians are going to the Russian occupation due to the lack of UAH 2,000-3,000 per month in state aid. Yes, the state cannot give all the displaced persons an apartment. But there is temporary housing. Yes, we cannot give every displaced person the same job for the same money as before. Because we are at war. But there is work for those who want to work," the official emphasized.

Vereshchuk believes that such statements are disrespectful to the millions of Ukrainians who left the TOT and are building a new life. In addition, she believes that with such statements, some politicians support the enemy narrative that it is supposedly better under occupation.

"Therefore, your information activities are subversive and criminal in nature. This is especially harmful to the state now," Vereshchuk noted.

As the Ukrainian News agency reported, earlier, a member of the Verkhovna Rada Committee on Human Rights, a Member of Parliament from the Servant of the People party, Maksym Tkachenko, claimed that more than 150,000 Ukrainians, who forcibly became internally displaced persons (IDPs) due to the full-scale invasion of the russian federation, have returned to the occupied territories.

At a meeting of the section of the Association of Ukrainian Cities (ACU) on the development of de-occupied and temporarily occupied communities, it was also noted that a significant outflow of Ukrainians to the territories temporarily occupied by the russians has been recorded today. In particular, the mayor of Mariupol, Donetsk Region, Vadym Boichenko, said that the outflow of Ukrainians to the TOT is due to hostile propaganda, as well as the lack of housing.

In September, President Volodymyr Zelenskyy appointed Vereshchuk as the Deputy Head of the President's Office, after the Verkhovna Rada dismissed her from the post of the Deputy Prime Minister - Minister for the Reintegration of Temporarily Occupied Territories, which she had held since November 2021.

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