GENEVA, March 3 (NNN-AGENCIES) — One million refugees have fled Ukraine in the week since Russia’s invasion, the UN’s refugee agency announced Thursday.
“In just seven days we have witnessed the exodus of one million refugees from Ukraine to neighbouring countries,” the UN’s High Commissioner for Refugees Filippo Grandi tweeted, while urging “guns to fall silent” in the
country.
The tally from UNHCR amounts to more than 2 per cent of Ukraine’s population on the move in under a week.
The World Bank counted the population at 44 million at the end of 2020.
The UN agency has predicted that up to 4 million people could eventually leave Ukraine but cautioned that even that projection could be revised upward.
In an email, UNHCR spokesperson Joung-ah Ghedini-Williams wrote: “Our data indicates we passed the 1M mark” as of midnight in central Europe, based on counts collected by national authorities.
On Twitter, UN High Commissioner for Refugees Filippo Grandi wrote: “In just seven days we have witnessed the exodus of one million refugees from Ukraine to neighbouring countries.”
Grandi appealed for the “guns to fall silent” in Ukraine so humanitarian aid could reach millions more still inside Ukraine.
Such comments testified to the growing concerns across the UN system, with agencies like the World Health Organization and the UN Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs voicing their worry.
Syria, whose civil war erupted in 2011, currently remains the country with the largest refugee outflows — at more than 5.6 million people, according to UNHCR figures.
But even at the swiftest rate of flight by refugees out of Syria, in early 2013, it took at least three months for 1 million refugees to leave that country.
Two years later, in 2015, hundreds of thousands of Syrian and other refugees who had mostly been in Turkey fled into Europe, prompting disarray in the European Union over its response and at times skirmishes and pushbacks at some national borders.
So far, UN officials and others have generally praised the response from Ukraine’s neighbours, who have opened homes, gymnasiums and other facilities to take in the new refugees.
UNHCR spokesperson Shabia Mantoo said “at this rate” the outflows from Ukraine could make it the source of “the biggest refugee crisis this century”.
According to the latest figures on UNHCR’s online data portal, more than half of the refugees from Ukraine had gone to neighbouring Poland and more than 116,000 had gone to Hungary to the south.
Moldova had taken in more than 79,000 and 71,200 had gone to Slovakia. — NNN-AGENCIES
