The Ukrainian Ministry of Social Policy is planning to stop social payouts to 350,000 fictitious displaced persons, Social Policy Minister Pavlo Rozenko has said.

"By this moment, the social policy authorities have received documentation on 350,000 people regarding the payouts halt," he said at a briefing in Kyiv on Thursday.

Ukraine has registered 1.7 million of internal migrants to date, the government pays them UAH 30 billion each month, Rozenko said.

At the same time, efforts are underway to identify people who produce false certificates and are not real migrants, he said.

"We are canceling certificates and the current migrants come to get new ones, so in the Dnipropetrovsk region, for 100 canceled certificates only 10% came to get new ones," the minister said.

Furthermore, Ukrainian Security Service (SBU) chief Vasyl Hrytsak said SBU conducted checks in five regions with the highest numbers of temporarily displaced persons: Donetsk, Luhansk, Dnipropetrovsk, Zaporizhia and Kharkiv regions. "We discovered numerous instances of pension and social payouts on the basis of false migrant accommodation papers," he said.

Most often a person would get registered with social security authorities, obtain all certificates, start receiving the pension, and then return to the area not controlled by the Ukrainian government, the SBU chief said.