September 13th, 2022

UN IOM Director

By Joseph Nichols, 


A note from the UN today………

Ukraine to experience a tough winter, IOM director general says

Any damage inflicted on Ukraine’s power and heating systems will seriously exacerbate living conditions this winter, especially for an estimated 6.9 million internally displaced people, the United Nations migration agency said.

In response to a Ukrainian counteroffensive in the east and south of the country recently, Russia has stepped up shelling of power stations and other infrastructure, causing blackouts in the city of Kharkiv and elsewhere.

“Any attempt to damage those facilities will have a terrible impact on the capacity to heat those cities,” Antonio Vitorino, director general of the International Organization of Migration (IOM) told a group of reporters in Kyiv.

“We are making all efforts to assist the population in preparing for the winter but we need electricity, and that depends on state services to [restore] a working electricity system,” said Vitorino, who met President Zelensky on Monday.

As many as eight million people, mostly women and children, have fled Ukraine in the past six months. Some of those people have since returned to Ukraine, which had a pre-war population of about 44 million.