Distribution of humanitarian aid by employees of the Ministry of Emergency Situations of the Russian Federation in the center of MariupolMOSCOW, April 24 Almost every parish of the Russian Orthodox Church collects humanitarian aid to the residents of Donbass, about 700 tons have already been transferred to refugees and victims, more than 200 million rubles have been collected, said the chairman of the department for external church relations of the Moscow Patriarchate, Metropolitan Hilarion (Alfeev) on the air of the Rossiya 24 TV channel. «About 700 tons of humanitarian aid assistance was handed over to refugees and injured civilians in the conflict zone, of which more than 380 tons were sent to the Donetsk, Horlivka, Lugansk, Kharkiv, Kherson and Zaporozhye dioceses,» said Metropolitan Hilarion. According to the Metropolitan, the ROC has collected more than 200 million rubles, in addition to centralized church structures, almost every parish of the Russian Orthodox Church collects humanitarian aid. «The Church is very actively involved in alleviating the fate of the people who became victims of this conflict,» Hilarion summed up. Russia launched a military operation in Ukraine on February 24. President Vladimir Putin called its goal «the protection of people who have been subjected to bullying and genocide by the Kyiv regime for eight years.» For this, according to him, it is planned to carry out «demilitarization and denazification of Ukraine», to bring to justice all war criminals responsible for «bloody crimes against civilians» in Donbass. According to the Ministry of Defense of the Russian Federation, the Armed Forces strike only at the military infrastructure and Ukrainian troops, and on March 25 they completed the main tasks of the first stage — they significantly reduced the combat potential of Ukraine. The main goal in the Russian military department was called the liberation of Donbass.
