There is no official data on how many Ukrainians returned to TOT and there cannot be - Vereshchuk

There is no official data on how many Ukrainians have returned to the temporarily occupied territories (TOT) and there cannot be.

Deputy Head of the President's Office, Iryna Vereshchuk, stated this on the air of a telethon, Ukrainian News Agency reports.

"There is no data on how many people have moved to the TOT from the territory controlled by the government of Ukraine and there cannot be. Our borders with the russian federation are closed. We have only one humanitarian corridor for entry into Ukraine. People from the TOT through russia or third countries can enter Ukraine, but they cannot leave. We do not have checkpoints, as there were in previous years before the full-scale invasion, where people crossed the contact line, and obviously there is no information that MPs, authorized representatives, who are commenting on this now, could refer to," she said.

Vereshchuk noted that the path that a person has to overcome to get to the TOT is difficult and expensive.

"The only point is Sheremetyevo Airport. A ticket costs about USD 1,000, which you need to have and go through three countries, go through filtration, go through all these search points to get to the TOT," the official noted.

She called the statements about the mass return of IDPs to the TOT a lie and hype and asked not to comment on things that cannot be proven either by sources from official bodies or other sources - human rights and international humanitarian organizations.

As Ukrainian News Agency earlier reported, Vereshchuk previously denied the mass return of IDPs to the TOT.

Earlier, a member of the Verkhovna Rada Committee on Human Rights, MP from the Servant of the People party, Maksym Tkachenko, stated that more than 150,000 Ukrainians who, due to the full-scale invasion of the russian federation, were forced to become internally displaced persons (IDPs), returned to the occupied territories. But then he called the statement about the number of IDPs returning to the occupied territories his own assumption.

At a meeting of the section of the Association of Ukrainian Cities (AUC) on the development of de-occupied and temporarily occupied communities, it was also said that a significant outflow of Ukrainians to the territories temporarily occupied by russians (TOT) has been recorded today. In particular, the mayor of Mariupol, Donetsk Region, Vadym Boychenko, 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 Deputy Head of the President's Office, after the Verkhovna Rada dismissed her from the post of Vice Prime Minister - Minister for the Reintegration of Temporarily Occupied Territories, which she had held since November 2021.

To request a correction, please send an email.