Situation with medicines in occupied Luhansk Oblast critical, people look for drugs through announcements

The situation with medicine supplies is critical in Luhansk Oblast which the Russians occupied in 2022. There is no centralised delivery of medicaments there so people seek medicine through paper announcements at the entrances of residential buildings. Source: Artem Lysohor, head of the Luhansk Oblast Military Administration, in the broadcast of Suspilne, Ukraine's public broadcaster 

Details: Lysohor indicated that the Russians had destroyed medical facilities and pharmacies in the occupied territories back in early 2022. Then the occupiers distributed medicine to people only when Russian Kremlin-aligned media came there to shoot footage about it.

"At the moment the aggressor is not rebuilding anything, and the situation with medicine has aggravated because the purchasing power of locals has obviously shrunk. Retired people are no longer able to pay for the delivery of needed medicine," Lysohor explains.

He adds that the Internet and mobile connection are absent in most settlements. For example, residents of the temporarily occupied settlement of Rubizhne put up paper announcements at the entrances of residential buildings about the medicine some of them need. "There are some volunteers who sometimes deliver medicine but there is no coordinated access to medicine on the territory of about 60 km from the collision line.

This is a huge problem, and the enemy is not going to solve it in any way," Lysohor states.

Read more: Russians reassign Ukrainian language teachers to teach Russian in occupied Luhansk Luhansk Oblast State Administration also reported that in 2023, the so-called LPR did not use 99% of the funds that were supposed to be used for medication under the reimbursement programme (LPR, Luhansk People's Republic, is the part of Ukraine's Luhansk Oblast currently occupied by the Russians and pro-Kremlin collaborationists - ed.). People were supposed to receive these medications on preferential prescriptions, including free of charge.

"They didn't use them (the funds) because they didn't want to. Due to the inactivity of the local 'ministry of health', the population that had been participating in the reimbursement programme for many years had to buy the medicines they needed for their lives at their own expense. They were left with no choice," says the Luhansk Oblast State Administration. 

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