Alarming trend: why people keep returning to Russian-occupied Mariupol

He said this on the Espreso TV channel.

"In fact, the numbers are different; we have our own calculations. Speaking about Mariupol and the figures we are correlating with today, including from our insights, about 30,000 people arrived and registered in Mariupol, and around 60% left and settled in the European Union, not returning to Ukraine," noted Andriushchenko.

According to the advisor to the mayor of Mariupol, the main issue often gets lost in the discussions around the numbers. The trend of returning to the occupied territories indeed exists. Even now, people from Odesa, who left and were evacuated from Pokrovsk, sometimes return there again. This is truly a frightening trend.

The advisor to the mayor of Mariupol emphasized that the main point to focus on is that no one knows how many people were evacuated from the occupied territories in 2022. It is important to remember that the only entry point from the occupied south of Ukraine was Vasylivka, and then Zaporizhzhia.

"To this day, no figures have been announced regarding how many people were evacuated. Therefore, it is clear that we cannot confidently say that 200,000 people left Mariupol. We have somewhat different numbers. This is a very complicated story with the figures. But there is a lot of noise that obscures and prevents solving the main issue. And the main problem is the attitude towards internally displaced people," added Andriushchenko.

• On June 17, the head of the parliamentary working group on housing issues within the Temporary Investigative Commission for the Protection of IDPs' Rights, Maksym Tkachenko, reported that nearly 130,000 internally displaced persons were forced to return home - to temporarily occupied territories of Ukraine or to areas of active conflict due to problems at their new places of residence.