The refugee crisis
On Ukraine’s border with Poland, there’s “a palpable sense of a country being entirely emptied of its women and children”, said David Cohen in the London Evening Standard. Nearly all of the Ukrainian women I met in the Polish border town of Kroscienko, fleeing the Russian invasion, had left male family members behind to fight. In one family were three generations of women: Inna, 56, her daughter Olena, 35, and her granddaughter, Karolina, eight, who had fled Kharkiv in the east after a week of Russian bombardment. As they left, said Inna, her granddaughter was so scared of being killed “that her hands were shaking and she couldn’t get her shoes on”. They’re part of a vast exodus: more than a million Ukrainian refugees are now in Poland alone, with 120,000 crossing the border each day. They’re also heading into other neighbouring countries: Hungary, Slovakia, Moldova and Romania. One Ukrainian boy of 11, identified only as Hasan, travelled solo for more than 700 miles to reach relatives in Slovakia, said Tim Hanlon in The Mirror. He had made the journey with only a plastic bag, his passport and a phone number written on the back of his hand.
This is human displacement on a scale unprecedented in Europe since the Second World War, said Bruno Waterfield and Paulina Olszanka in The Times. According to the UN refugee agency (UNHCR), more than two million Ukrainians have already left their homeland. Josep Borrell, the EU’s foreign affairs chief, has predicted that the number of refugees seeking safety will reach five million, far exceeding the 1.5 million who fled the war in Syria for Europe in 2015/16. Poland is bearing the brunt of the crisis thus far, and doing so with compassion, said Anastasia Lapatina in The Guardian. Thousands of ordinary Poles have hosted Ukrainians in their homes or offered assistance. The Polish government has pledged £1.33bn to help provide the refugees with lodgings, healthcare and work.
Across Europe, countries have waived visa rules and welcomed Ukrainians. Their generosity is in shameful contrast to the UK’s response, said Simon Jenkins in The Guardian. “The hypocrisy is intolerable”: Boris Johnson is “traipsing his Churchill act through the capitals of Europe”, but when asked to do one concrete thing that would help, he has failed. Two weeks after the invasion, the UK had only accepted 760 out of 22,000 applications. The UK’s scheme is miserly, said the FT. Only Ukrainians with relatives already here or those sponsored by a UK charity or individual get in. And the bureaucracy is Kafkaesque. “Families who have travelled at least 1,000 miles under appalling conditions to reach Calais have been told their visas can only be processed in the nearest offices of Paris or Brussels.” Security risks are talked up, though nearly all refugees are women and children. Britain is showing “a deliberate callousness” towards these desperate people in their hour of need.