Feb 24, 2022.
According to officials with the U.N.'s refugee agency, several thousand Ukrainians fled the country Thursday to escape a Russian invasion that has killed at least 137 Ukrainian soldiers.
A family is waiting for relatives after crossing into Poland.
Dozens of Ukrainians began arriving in the Polish border town of Medyka on Thursday, as authorities organized reception centers along the 330-mile Polish-Ukrainian border and designated a train for transporting wounded refugees to hospitals.
Travelers from outside the EU without a negative Covid-19 test result were allowed to come to Poland on Thursday.
Cars lined up at Hungary's border crossings as people fled the Russian invasion and the threat of being drafted into the Ukrainian military.
Slovakia will open more border crossings and send as many as 1,500 troops to its border, where cars arriving from Ukraine have reportedly been forced to wait for up to 12 hours.
The governor of the region said that about 2,000 beds and 60 gyms had been arranged to accommodate refugees.
Hundreds of people fled over the river to Romania, which is prepared to take 500,000 refugees, according to the defense minister.
According to Radio Bulgaria, the president of Bulgaria said that the country is open to Ukrainian citizens seeking to leave.
Russian President Vladimir Putin ordered a full-scale invasion of Ukraine on Thursday, with shelling and missile attacks from the east to the city of Lviv in the west. In Poland, the U.S. troops helped organize checkpoint and processing centers to accommodate tens of thousands of refugees, including some Americans, who were expected to leave Ukraine crossing the Polish border. Poland is likely to be most impacted by the refugee crisis in part because it is already home to about 1 million Ukrainians who could temporarily serve as hosts for refugees, according to a division director for migration at Open Society Foundations Europe. Czech Railways offered to send trains with 6,000 seats to Ukraine to help evacuate refugees, while German government officials said they would send aid to Ukraine.
The EU anticipates up to 1 million internal and external refugees, while Tomasz Hanczarek is an executive at Polish international staffing company Personnel Service. In December, the Ukrainian Defense Minister said that a Russian invasion could cause between 3 million and 5 million displacement. According to the New York Times, the Biden Administration estimated on February 3 that a full-scale invasion could cause between 1 million and 5 million Ukrainians to flee to Poland. There were a total of 34.4 million internationally displaced refugees in 2020.
No one wants to be conscripted, no one wants to die, and that is what ethnic Hungarian refugee Tamas Bodnar said when he arrived in Hungary.
A Russian invasion of Ukraine could flood Europe with millions of refugees.
How a Ukrainian Refugee Crisis would compare globally.
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