Russian troops have forced more than 1.7 million people out of Ukraine as the war heads into its third week.
The war in Ukraine is precipitating the fastest-growing refugee crisis since WWII, according to the U.N. high commissioner for refugees. More than 1 million civilians fled in the first week, and an estimated 4 million will flee in the coming weeks, according to the United Nations.
Josep Borrell, the European Union’s high representative, said on Monday that Europe needs to be prepared to receive many more refugees and drew a parallel to the continent’s 2015 refugee crisis. “We need to be prepared to receive 5 million people,” Borrell said. “We know that with the Syrian crisis in the 2015-16 years, which was the migrant crisis in Europe, we were talking about 1.5 million people; now, it’s going to be much more.”
Early in the conflict, Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky ordered that all men between 18 and 60 could not leave the country. Since Feb. 24, Ukrainians have been moving west into neighboring countries, mostly to Poland, where more than 1 million refugees have settled.
Europe has responded to the war by making travel out of Ukraine as easy as possible. Slovakia and Poland have told refugees they can enter without passports, and Ireland announced it was lifting visa requirements for people fleeing the conflict.
Despite support from their neighbors to the west, some Ukrainians are struggling to get out of the country safely. Russian-run “humanitarian corridors” are funneling people out of the war-torn cities of Kyiv, Kharkiv, Mariupol, and Sumy into Russia and its ally Belarus. According to the U.N., 53,300 people have been driven into the arms of their aggressors, and 406 have ended up in Belarus.
Russia announced it was opening up the corridors at 10 a.m. Moscow time on Monday and that it would monitor the routes with drones.
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While most Ukrainians are heading for other European countries, thousands of Ukrainians and Russians have appeared at the U.S.-Mexico border. U.S. border officials have encountered 6,400 Russians and 1,000 Ukrainians at the border since October 2021. Those figures do not include migrants seeking asylum since the war began, but an anonymous official told Reuters there could be an increase as a result of the conflict.
Last week, the U.S. announced it would grant temporary protected status for any Ukrainians who were in the country as of March 1.
