Topline
Officials with U.N.’s refugee agency estimate that “several thousand” Ukrainians fled the country Thursday to escape a Russian invasion that has reportedly killed at least 137 Ukrainian soldiers and civilians so far, as neighboring nations prepare to absorb what could be hundreds of thousands to millions of refugees.
A Ukrainian family waits for relatives after crossing into Poland to escape Russian bombardment.
Key Facts
“Dozens” of Ukrainians began arriving in the Polish border town of Medyka on Thursday, as authorities organized eight reception centers along the roughly 330-mile Polish-Ukrainian border and designated a train for transporting wounded refugees to hospitals.
To help accommodate arriving refugees, Poland on Thursday ended restrictions for travelers coming from outside the EU without a negative Covid-19 test result, Reuters reported.
Cars reportedly lined up at Hungary’s border crossings as people, including members of Ukraine’s numerous Hungarian diaspora, fled the Russian invasion and the threat of conscription into the Ukrainian military.
Slovakia announced it would open more border crossings and dispatch as many as 1,500 troops to its border, where cars arriving from Ukraine have reportedly been forced to wait for up to 12 hours.
In Slovakia, about 2,000 beds and 60 gyms had been arranged to accommodate refugees, regional Governor Rostislav Trnka told Reuters.
“Several hundred” people reportedly fled Ukraine over the Danube River to Romania, which is prepared to take roughly 500,000 refugees, Romanian Defense Minister Vasile Dincu said.
Bulgaria is open to “all” Ukrainian citizens seeking evacuation, and has received requests from over 4,000 ethnic Bulgarians in Ukraine, Bulgarian President Rumen Radev said Thursday, according to Radio Bulgaria.
Key Background
Russian President Vladimir Putin on Thursday ordered what he called a “special military operation” in Ukraine, launching a full-scale invasion with shelling and missile attacks reaching from separatist areas in the east to the city of Lviv in the west. In Poland, U.S. troops spent the days leading up to the invasion helping organize checkpoints and processing centers to accommodate tens of thousands of refugees, including some Americans, anticipated to leave Ukraine crossing the Polish border. Poland is likely to be most impacted by the refugee crisis in part because it is already home to about 1 million Ukrainians, who could temporarily serve as hosts for refugees, Magdalena Majkowska-Tomkin, division director for migration at Open Society Foundations Europe, told Bloomberg. However, countries not sharing a border with Ukraine have also stepped up: Czech Railways offered to send trains with 6,000 seats to Ukraine to help evacuate refugees, while German government officials said they would “very quickly” send aid to Ukraine’s border states.
What We Don’t Know
How many Ukrainians will be displaced by Russia’s invasion – and how many will flee elsewhere in Ukraine versus journey abroad. The EU anticipates up to 1 million internal and external refugees, while Tomasz Hanczarek, executive at Polish international staffing company Personnel Service, projected up to 3 million, Bloomberg reported. Ukrainian Defense Minister Oleksii Reznikov said in December a Russian invasion could displace between 3 million and 5 million. Biden Administration officials estimated February 3 that a full-scale invasion could displace between 1 million and 5 million Ukrainians, a good number of whom would flee to Poland, the New York Times reported. By comparison, in 2020 there were a total of 34.4 million internationally displaced refugees worldwide.
Crucial Quote
“No one wants to get conscripted, no one wants to die,” ethnic Hungarian refugee Tamas Bodnar told Reuters upon arriving in Hungary from Ukraine. “It’s clear that those who can, they flee.”
Further Reading
“A Russian Invasion Of Ukraine Could Flood Europe With Millions Of Refugees” (Forbes)
“How A Ukrainian Refugee Crisis Would Compare Globally” (Forbes)
Source: https://www.forbes.com/sites/zacharysmith/2022/02/24/thousands-flee-ukraine-amid-russian-invasion-thatcould-displace-millions-creating-a-refugee-crisis-for-europe/