West ignores humanitarian crisis in east Ukraine: Analyst

The West is turning a blind eye to the current humanitarian crisis in east Ukraine, a political analyst tells Press TV as thousands of people are reportedly fleeing their homes amid Kiev’s military operations.

“The international response [to the humanitarian crisis] has been a total failure, and it appears to me that it has been very organized because these attacks on the civilians to get them to run have been perpetrated primarily to try to create its mass punishment again,” Jim W. Dean, an editor and columnist with Veterans Today, said in an interview with Press TV on Saturday.

He added that the West and media’s silence regarding the humanitarian crisis in Ukraine are considered as an approval for having “terror used as a weapon against east Ukrainian people for them to achieve some geopolitical goal that they have.”

The analyst also noted that the shelling by the Ukraine army is “nothing more than a terror weapon to get people to flee.”

On Friday, the Office of the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR) said nearly 100,000 people have escaped the conflict area to other Ukrainian regions, while some 130,000 others have fled to Russia.

"There are a variety of security concerns and a variety of reasons for people making the decision to leave their homes," UNHCR spokesman, Dan McNorton, said, adding that fears of being caught in the crossfire have been a major reason.

On Thursday, the International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC) officially described the conflict in eastern Ukraine as a civil war, urging the government and pro-Russia forces to respect the laws of conflict.

Ukraine launched military operations in the eastern provinces of Donetsk and Lugansk in mid-April to crush the pro-Russia demonstrations there. Violence intensified in May after the two regions held local referendums, in which their residents voted overwhelmingly in favor of independence from Ukraine.

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