HRW: Ukraine Travel Restrictions Impede Health Care
The U.S.-based group Human Rights Watch says travel restrictions imposed by the government of Ukraine have contributed to serious delays in delivery of medical care in rebel-controlled areas of the east.
The group released a statement Friday saying it bases its assertion on 10 days of phone and in-person interviews with medical personnel and patients in eastern Ukraine.
HRW says the travel restrictions impede access for Ukrainian citizens in eastern Ukraine who need to travel to government-controlled areas to use state-funded medical services. The group said patients being treated for HIV, tuberculosis, and drug addiction are particularly impacted by the restrictions.
It says the restrictions have also created delays in delivering medications that result in shortages at medical facilities.
A spokesman in Kyiv for Foreign Minister Pavlo Klimkin told a reporter for The Associated Press that Ukraine has formally asked the United Nations to deploy for a peacekeeping mission in eastern Ukraine.
Pro-Russian separatists began an armed rebellion in eastern Ukraine in April last year. Since then, thousands of people have died in the violence.
On Thursday, Germany’s top diplomat warned against supplying Ukraine with lethal weaponry in its fight against pro-Russian separatists, saying such a move could trigger a “dangerous, permanent escalation” of the crisis facing Kyiv and Moscow.
Foreign Minister Frank Walter-Steinmeier made the remark in Washington after talks with U.S. Secretary of State John Kerry. He told an audience at the Center for Strategic and International Studies that giving such weapons to Ukraine could send the ongoing conflict spinning “out of control.”
Steinmeier also predicted that pressure within and outside the United States to arm Ukraine will increase if pro-Russian rebels attempt to seize the strategically important Ukraine seaport of Mariupol.
The latest German warning comes just days after that country’s ambassador to the United States said President Barack Obama has decided against sending lethal weaponry to Ukraine at this time.
President Obama has come under increasing pressure from the U.S. Congress to bolster the vastly overmatched Ukrainian army with lethal defensive weaponry.
But French Defense Minister Jean-Yves Le Drian said last month that France has no intention of providing lethal hardware to Kyiv “at this time,” while Germany’s Chancellor Merkel has repeatedly voiced opposition to such a move.
Other military aid critics have argued that no amount of Western weaponry in Ukraine would stop a concerted Russian incursion by a military said to be at least four times larger than Ukraine’s, with twice as many tanks and more than six times as many combat aircraft.