The anti-terrorist operation (ATO) zone in eastern Ukraine is a site of the ongoing humanitarian catastrophe, OSCE Special Monitoring Mission to Ukraine (OSCE SMM) spokesman Michael Bociurkiw told reporters in Kyiv on Friday.

He said the observers had visited eastern regions and reported deteriorating conditions in many towns of Donetsk and Luhansk regions.

The monitors saw devastated hospital buildings which had no medicine with which to treat their patients, many children were in shock and had nowhere to study or to play, and people had no access to social services, the officer said.

Many villages, which technically are not located within the ATO zone but bordered it, were shelled. The monitors helped workers of the International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC) to reach those villages, Bociurkiw said.