Latest from the Special Monitoring Mission (SMM) in Ukraine based on information received until 10 July 2014, 18:00 (Kyiv time)

This update is provided for the media and the public.

The situation in the central-southern part of the Luhansk region and the central part of the Donetsk region remained volatile. Other parts of the country remained calm.

In Luhansk, the SMM was told by a source that the Head of the Ukrainian Emergency Service in Luhansk negotiated passage for a bus from Svatovo (150 km north of Luhansk) through checkpoints of the so-called ‘Luhansk People’s Republic’. The bus, which would later return, carried 40 women and children from Lukansk to the train station in Svatovo, where they boarded a special train for transport of internally displaced people to Kharkiv.

In Donetsk, the SMM visited the railway station. Train traffic seemed to operate as scheduled. The atmosphere was tense because of gunfire in the vicinity of the airport. The Donetsk to Moscow train - with few passengers - was about to leave. The railway station was guarded by the ‘Vostok’ battalion. The SMM also met police representatives in Donetsk who denied media information suggesting that men were not allowed to board trains to leave the city.

The ‘prime minister’ and ‘minister of defence’ of the so-called ‘Donetsk People’s Republic’ announced at a press conference that the partial evacuation of some areas of Donetsk city were under preparation.

The SMM met the deputy head of the Dnepropetrovsk Department of the Ministry of Emergency Situations, who is currently coordinating humanitarian and additional assistance in Sloviansk. He informed the SMM that 99 per cent of the humanitarian aid was food.  A list of basic needs was prepared. He underlined the urgent need for insulin.  As of 10 July, 60 percent of the inhabitants of Sloviansk, he said, had electricity. He said that train traffic from Sloviansk to Kharkiv had been re-established. At the railway station in Sloviansk, the SMM saw that tickets were being sold for the train to Kharkiv in the afternoon.

The SMM met the head of the Meskhetian Turkish minority in Sloviansk, who said that, pre-conflict, some 700 of them were living in the town. According to him, approximately 95 per cent had left the settlement during the conflict but were now slowly returning. 

The situation in Dnepropetrovsk, Kherson, Odessa, Chernivtsi, Ivano-Frankivsk and Lviv was calm.

In Chernivtsi, the SMM met the regional military representative, who said that protests of soldiers’ relatives against the deployment of the battalions beyond the territory of Chernivtsi had come to an end, after the departure of soldiers to the east on 02/03 July. He stated that civil efforts within the Chernivtsi region to provide support (food and equipment) to the armed forces in the east of Ukraine continued.

The situation in Kyiv was calm.