GORKI (outside Moscow), September 24 (RIA Novosti) - Some 300,000 Ukrainian refugees fleeing the conflict in the country's southeast have applied for asylum in Russia, head of Russia's federal Migration Service, Konstantin Romodanovsky said on Wednesday.
"There are 875,000 refugees from the Luhansk and Donetsk regions on the Russian territory," Romodanovsky said at a meeting with Prime Minister Dmitry Medvedev.
"About one-third of them, or some 300,000 people, have asked for temporary asylum status or temporary residence permit," he said.
According to the United Nations' data, the conflict in eastern Ukraine has claimed the lives of more than 3,000 people. The director of the Donetsk Region's health department, Elena Petryaeva, said about 1,300 residents of the region had been killed in the confrontation, with about 3,500 injured. The deputy prime minister of the self-proclaimed Donetsk People's Republic, Andrei Purgin, said Monday that some 4,000 people had lost their lives in the region.
