Updated on 04:19 p.m. Moscow Time
KIEV, September 3 (RIA Novosti) – The West will send a mission to Ukraine to assess the destruction in the country’s eastern regions, Ukrainian Prime Minister Arseniy Yatsenyuk said Wednesday.
“The EU and our Western partners will send their missions here to assess the destruction [in the country’s eastern republics] and in November, we will hold a large donor conference with the goal of raising money to rebuild Donbas,” Yatsenyuk said during a government session.
"We are currently assessing all the losses, all the destruction in the Donbas. We cannot evaluate them yet. It’s impossible. I reiterate that, just two months ago, when we were liberating Slaviansk, our estimation was eight billion hryvnias, I can say today that you are free to substitute the hryvnia with the dollar. This is billions of dollars," Yatsenyuk said.
In late June, Ukraine’s parliament made changes to the state budget to allocate 1,9 hryvnias ($158 million) for the restoration of infrastructure in the country’s eastern regions of Luhansk and Donetsk that have been ravaged by the ongoing military campaign.
Since mid-April, Kiev has been conducting a military operation against the southeastern regions of Ukraine that refused to recognize the legitimacy of the new government after a February coup. The fighting intensified after Donetsk and Luhansk regions proclaimed independence in May.
Almost 2,600 people, including the victims of the Malaysia Airlines flight MH17 crash, have been killed and more than 6,000 injured since the start of Kiev’s military operation in eastern Ukraine, according to the UN.
Moscow continues to insist on an immediate end to the “punitive operation” in eastern Ukraine.
