1 million fled Ukraine since Russian invasion, says UN

Kyiv: At least one million people have fled Ukraine since Russia’s invasion less than a week ago, the United Nations (UN) refugee agency said.   

According to details, UN with one official warning said that “at this rate” the exodus could become “the biggest refugee crisis this century”.  

Thursday’s tally from the UN High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR) amounts to more than 2% of Ukraine’s population, which the World Bank counted at 44 million at the end of 2020, on the move across borders in just 7 days.  

The agency cautioned that the outflows were far from finished. 

The organization has predicted that as many as 4 million people could eventually leave war-hit Ukraine, and even that projection could be revised upward. 

A spokeswoman for the UNHCR, Joung-ah Ghedini-Williams said—in an email— that “our data indicates we passed the 1 million mark” as of midnight in central Europe, based on counts collected by national authorities. 

On Twitter, UN High Commissioner Filippo Grandi wrote, “In just seven days we have witnessed the exodus of one million refugees from Ukraine to neighboring countries.”

“For many millions more, inside Ukraine, it’s time for guns to fall silent, so that life-saving humanitarian assistance can be provided,” he added.

On February 24—the first day of invasion— over 82,000 people left Ukraine. 

Based on the latest UNHCR count, each day afterwards resulted in at least 117,000 new refugees—hitting a peak of nearly 200,000 on Tuesday alone.  

In comparison, Syria, whose civil war erupted in 2011 and remains the country with the largest refugee outflows, had nearly 5.7 million people fleeing, according to UNHCR’s figures. 

However, at the fasted rate of flight in early 2013, it took at least three months for one million refugees to leave Syria. 

In 2015, hundreds of thousands of Syrian and other refugees who had mostly been in Turkey fled to Europe—prompting disarray in the European Union (EU) over its response and at times, skirmishes and pushbacks at some national borders. 

In the meantime, UN officials and others have generally praised the response from Ukraine’s neighbours that have opened homes, gymnasiums, and other facilities to take in the new refugees. 

According to official data, more than half of the refugees went to Poland and more than 116,000 to Hungary to the south. 

Moldova— Eastern European country and former Soviet republic— has taken in more than 79,000 and 71,200 have gone to Slovakia.