As a million people flee the Ukraine to neighbouring countries, the UN worries it could be the biggest refugee crisis this century. Photo / AP
As a million people flee the Ukraine to neighbouring countries, the UN worries it could be the biggest refugee crisis this century. Photo / AP
The United Nations refugee agency said yesterday that one million people have now fled Ukraine since Russia's invasion a week ago, an exodus without precedent in this century for its speed.
The tally from the UN High Commissioner for Refugees amounts to more than 2 per cent of Ukraine's population — which the World Bank counted at 44 million at the end of 2020 — on the move across borders in just seven days.
The agency cautions that the outflows are far from finished: It has predicted that as many as 4 million people could eventually leave Ukraine, and even that projection could be revised upward.
In an email, UNHCR spokeswoman Joung-ah Ghedini-Williams wrote, "Our data indicates we passed the 1m mark".
On Twitter, UN High Commissioner Filippo Grandi wrote, "In just seven days we have witnessed the exodus of one million refugees from Ukraine to neighbouring countries."
People fleeing Ukraine, hand in their passports as they register for a bus which will take them to Germany, at the train station in Przemysl, Poland, on March 3. Photo / AP
Grandi appealed for the "guns to fall silent" in Ukraine so humanitarian aid can reach millions more still inside the country.
Grandi's comments testified to the desperation of Ukrainians as artillery fire, exploding mortar shells and gunfire echoed across the country, and the growing concerns across the UN system which launched an appeal for funds this week.
The day-by-day figures pointed to the dizzying speed of the evacuation: After more than 82,000 people left on the first day of the Russian invasion on February 24, each day after that tallied at least 117,000 new refugees, hitting a peak of nearly 200,000 on Wednesday alone.
Some longtime staffers accustomed to dealing with refugee crises said they'd never seen anything like this exodus.
Syria, whose civil war erupted in 2011, remains the country with the largest refugee outflows — nearly 5.7 million people, according to UNHCR's figures. But even at the swiftest rate of flight out of that country, in early 2013, it took at least three months for one million refugees to leave Syria.
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 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 spokeswoman Shabia Mantoo said that 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. Others have gone to Hungary in the south and Moldova and Slovakia.
