Chaos and destruction force 10 million to flee homes

After three weeks of fighting the scale of the population movement has exceeded even the most pessimistic forecasts before the war.

A young Ukrainian takes a peak outside at a transit camp in Siret after crossing the border into Romania. Picture: AFP

More than 10 million people have left their homes in Ukraine since the start of the invasion, according to UN agencies and aid groups, with up to 3.5 million having already fled the country.

After three weeks of fighting, the scale of the population movement has exceeded even the most pessimistic forecasts circulating before the war, which suggested that there might be up to five million refugees.

There are nearly 6.5 million people who have been driven from their homes but remain inside the country, according to a study by the UN’s International Organisation for Migration.

That would mean more than a fifth of Ukraine’s 44 million population has been displaced, amounting to the largest refugee crisis since the Second World War.

Even this estimate may not reflect the full breadth of the problem, with a further 12 million believed to have been stranded, whether by heavy fighting, the destruction of bridges and other infrastructure, or a lack of resources.

“People continue to flee because they are afraid of bombs, airstrikes and indiscriminate destruction,” said Filippo Grandi, 64, head of the UNHCR, the UN’s refugee agency.

There are growing concerns in Europe that the war could stir up another wave of migrants from Africa and the Middle East because of hunger resulting from the collapse in grain and fertiliser exports from Russia and Ukraine, two of the world’s largest producers. EU states have begun arguing about how to cope with the anticipated influx, with Italy and Greece – which sit on two of the main migration routes into the bloc – urging other countries to agree to quotas in advance.

War-torn or unstable countries such as Yemen, Lebanon and Libya depend on Ukraine and Russia for substantial fractions of their wheat imports. In addition, they are at the mercy of global prices, which are projected to rise by as much as 22 per cent.

Up to now the overwhelming majority of refugees from the war in Ukraine have crossed into the EU, with about 170,000 believed to have moved to Russia, mostly from Russian-occupied areas.

Poland alone has taken in more than two million in the space of three weeks and up to 50,000 a day continue to arrive at its principal border crossings from Ukraine.

Moldova, a country of 2.5 million people, has admitted the largest number of refugees relative to its population, although many have used it as a transit country to other states such as Romania and the Czech Republic.

Germany initially expected to receive 225,000 Ukrainians but 218,000 have already come. The country’s experience of taking in more than 1.2 million migrants over 2015 and 2016 has left it with a capacious system for processing new arrivals.

However, Berlin, Hamburg and several other cities are struggling to cope with daily numbers of refugees that surpass even the peaks of the 2015 migration crisis. Hamburg said it had found space for 15,000 in three weeks, compared with a maximum of 6000 a month in 2015.

The German capital’s central station has become so crowded that the state has begun transporting Ukrainians by bus to an impromptu tent city in the old airport at Tegel, where they will be given temporary beds until they can be moved to other parts of the country. The authorities are also having trouble registering the refugees because of a shortage of the devices used to take their fingerprints.

The Times