United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR) spokesman Adrian Edwards speaking at a news conference at the United Nations in Geneva about Ukraine internally displaced people:
"Ukraine's Ministry of Social Policy now puts the total number of registered IDPs country-wide at 980,000, the figure is likely to rise as more newly displaced people are still in the process of being registered. In addition, some 600,000 Ukrainians have sought asylum or other forms of legal stay in neighboring countries, particularly the Russian Federation, also in Belarus, Moldova, Poland, Hungary, and Romania, since February of last year."
"So far, more than 2,800 civilians, including about 700 children, 60 disabled people have been evacuated from Debaltseve, Avdiyivka, and Svitlodar, which have seen fierce combat, several incidents of shelling of buses carrying evacuees have been reported. Local authorities also confirm that evacuation transportation could not reach Avdiyivka on Tuesday because of the fighting."
"The hardships are intense as I have described, people are trapped in basements, they are without proper access, the civilian infrastructure is being destroyed, there is risks to people trying to get out of these areas, it's an immensely tragic situation, now with astonishingly large numbers of people affected."
When Russia last went to war, in Georgia in 2008, it looked like an easy victory. But Russia's generals were deeply concerned at how badly their forces performed in some key areas of modern warfare. Since then, Russia has been intensively reorganizing, rearming, reequipping and retraining its forces in order to deal with those deficiencies, and to try and close the capability gap with modern Western armies.
Now, with that work still in progress, Russia has a chance to try out some of its new systems and capabilities under combat conditions. While much of the Russian hardware deployed in Ukraine is not new, and some systems that are compare poorly with Western equivalents, they still represent significant developments in Russian capability.
Two key examples are the use of UAVs − drones − for surveillance and targeting, and the use of electronic warfare (EW). Both of these were identified as areas of weakness in the Russian forces in 2008, and both have been intensively developed since. Now they are in widespread use in eastern Ukraine; Ukrainian forces have not gone through the same intensive modernization process, and are at a strong disadvantage when they come up against newer equipment supplied by Russia.
This is why the Ukrainian government has consistently been requesting supplies of not just weapons, but also ‘non-lethal’ assistance and equipment, in order better to resist Russian-supplied separatist forces. The public refusals by Western governments to provide this assistance work in Russia's favour: not only by keeping the Ukrainian government forces relatively weak, but also by signalling clearly where the West's limits lie and thereby simplifying President Vladimir Putin's risk assessments.