At least 6,000 residents of nursing homes remain in the territories occupied or surrounded by the Russian army.
This was announced by the Project Coordinator of the Ukrainian Helsinki Human Rights Union Margarita Tarasova, ZMINA reports.
Currently, at least 42 nursing homes are located in areas surrounded by Russian troops or cut off from government-controlled areas. At the same time, human rights activists say, all these institutions work despite the danger, in particular - thanks to volunteer assistance.
Data on the number of nursing homes under occupation are collected by a group of human rights activists working on human rights protection in these facilities, more specifically in geriatric, psychoneurological, social nursing homes, homes for people with disabilities, and other institutions.
As of March 25, most of these institutions were in the Kherson region - at least 10. No institution was evacuated from the region. There are at least six institutions in Chernihiv, Luhansk, Kharkiv, and Sumy oblasts. In general, some nursing homes remain in danger in Kyiv, Zaporizhia, and Mykolayiv oblasts.
At the same time, according to human rights activists, almost all orphanages were evacuated from the occupied or blocked territories, including evacuation abroad.
According to the representative of the Expert Center for Human Rights Olena Temchenko, the responsibility for the evacuation was put on local authorities, which had very limited capabilities. She called for national authorities to get involved in this issue.
"Very contradictory information has been presented to the media and the authorities. An example is one of the nursing homes in the Kyiv region, which was reportedly seized by the Russian military and freed later. In fact, it was neither seized nor freed, it was blocked because of active fighting and there was no way to get there. At the same time, the responsible authorities were convinced that the nursing home was safe," she said.
Human rights activists call on the responsible ministries and agencies to assess the situation with nursing homes and where possible organize evacuations as soon as possible.
On March 5 the press service of the Kyiv Region Military Administration reported that in town of Borodyanka Kadyrovtsy captured more than 600 patients from psychoneurological nursing home and mined premises. On the evening of the same day, the Head of the Kyiv Regional Military Administration Oleksiy Kuleba said that Ukrainian special forces had released people from the seized facility.
On March 11, Russian troops fired on the Oskilsky psychoneurological nursing home in the Kharkiv region. No casualties were reported, as everyone was in the shelter.
On March 20, the Head of the Luhansk Regional State Administration Serhiy Haidai said that 56 people were killed in Russian shelling of an elderly home in the town of Kreminna in the Luhansk region. According to him, the shelling took place on March 11. He also said that the occupiers had taken 15 people from there to the temporarily occupied town of Svatove in the Luhansk region, and the fate of another 60 was still unknown. Before the full-scale Russian invasion, there were 84 people in the elderly home.