By Alan Charlish and Branco Filopovic
PRZEMYSL, Poland/SIRET, Romania (Reuters) – More than 1.7 million Ukrainians fleeing Russia’s invasion have so far crossed into Central Europe, the United Nation’s refugee agency said on Monday, as thousands more streamed across the borders.
Poland – which has the largest Ukrainian community in Central Europe – has received more than 1 million Ukrainian refugees since the conflict began on Feb. 24, with the milestone passed late on Sunday.
“Today at 20:00 the number of people who escaped from Ukraine to Poland exceeded one million,” the Polish border guard service tweeted late on Sunday.
“This is a million human tragedies, a million people banished from their homes by the war.”
A total of 1,735,068 civilians – mostly women and children, as men stayed home to fight – have so far crossed the border into Central Europe, the UNHCR said.
The European Union could see as many as 5 million Ukrainian refugees if Russia’s bombardment of Ukraine continues, the EU’s top diplomat, Josep Borrell, said. Russia calls its actions in Ukraine a “special operation”.
FOOD AND DIAPERS
Central Europeans, whose memories of Moscow’s dominance after World War Two run deep, continued to show support for their eastern neighbours.
At Przemysl, the nearest large Polish town to its busiest border crossing with Ukraine, a children’s charity was preparing a converted school sports hall to welcome about 150 Ukrainian children evacuated from orphanages in the Kyiv region.
“We have food for them, there will be lots of kids who are very small so we will have to change diapers, etc,” Przemek Macholak, 25, deputy head of crisis response at Happy Kids, a Polish non-governmental organisation, told Reuters.
“Then they will go to the buses again, they will go off to Poland, another 20-hour journey,” he said in the hall, where mothers and children rested on cots in the main hall and donations of clothes, food and drinks lined the corridors outside.
Happy Kids, which has assisted the evacuation of some 2,000 orphans so far, said it was trying not to separate the children once they arrived in Poland.
“Just two days ago we had a transport of 700 kids,” said Macholak. “It’s not easy to find a place for anybody but its even tougher to find a place for 700 kids in the same one place.”
The Polish government plans to create an 8 billion zloty ($1.75 billion) fund to help refugees from Ukraine, a government official said on Monday.
In Romania, at the Siret border crossing with Ukraine, volunteers in reflective jackets welcomed Ukrainian mothers carrying backpacks, pushing prams or holding toddlers as they left the crossing, with the wind blowing and the snow falling.
One woman brushed away tears as she walked.
Meanwhile, Czechs have now donated 1.5 billion crowns ($62.8 million) so far towards aid for Ukraine, the largest amount ever collected for humanitarian help in the country, Czech TV reported.
(Additional reporting by Pawel Florkiewicz in Warsaw, Luiza Ilie in Bucharest and Robert Muller in Prague; Writing by Gwladys Fouche, Editing by Emelia Sithole-Matarise)
