“I have a lot of friends and my grandparents there but I feel more free now that we’ve moved here.”<br /><br />Nine-year-old Hrystynka left Crimea immediately after Russia invaded. Her family turned down Russian citizenship, sold their apartment in Simferopol and took out a mortgage near Kyiv. <br /><br />As of this month, Ukraine counted more than 417,000 internally displaced people.<br /><br />Hrystynka’s mother Natalia Mykhaylichenko said: “Of course, now there are too many refugees. How many people receive any real help? Some might get a place in a sanatorium. My husband, who’s a very serious person, said the country is in such a state we can’t burden it with our problems. Let’s rely on ourselves.”<br /><br />The state provides apartments only for around one fifth to one quarter of all refugees. The others must fend for themselves. Human rights activist Olha Skripnyk is co-author of a law passed just days ago, which commits the state to provide accommodation for six months and also simplifies employment applications for refugees. It’s aimed at preventing discrimination and promoting integration.<br /><br />Ms Skripnyk, head of ‘Almenda’, Centre for Civic education, said: “Many employers ask displaced people to go to Donbas to get their proof of previous employment — forcing people to go back to where there’s an armed conflict. But now the law entitles an internally displaced person to a simplified procedure.”<br /><br />The law proposed that displaced people get the same rights to buy land as the local population, and exemption from taxation on domestic humanitarian aid, but these measures didn’t pass. <br /><br />Ms Skripnyk said: “Aid from abroad will not be taxed, but domestic humanitarian aid will be, at standard rates.”<br /><br />The United Nations said earlier this month that more than one million people have been displaced by the conflict in Ukraine. A Russian immigration official put the number of Ukrainian refugees now in Russia at one million, although Ukrainian officials say the number is vastly exaggerated by Moscow for political reasons.<br /><br />http://www.reuters.com/article/2014/10/07/us-ukraine-crisis-refugees-idUSKCN0HW0UP20141007
