At least 660,000 people, mostly women and children, fled Ukraine in the five days after Russia invaded — the most intense wave of European migration since at least the 1990s.
The war in Ukraine has set off the fastest mass migration in Europe in at least three decades, prompting comparisons with the Balkan wars of the 1990s and providing echoes of the vast population displacement that followed World War II.
At least 660,000 people, most of them women and children, fled Ukraine for neighboring countries to the west in the first five days of Russia’s invasion, according to the United Nations refugee agency, which collated statistics recorded by national immigration authorities. And that figure does not include those displaced within Ukraine, or who fled or were ordered to evacuate to Russia.
In less than a week, the flight of Ukrainians is at least 10 times as high as the one-week record of people entering Europe during the 2015 migration crisis, and nearly double the number of refugees recorded by the United Nations during the first 11 days of the Kosovo war in 1999.
The historic westward movement of people has caused lines of up to 24 hours at border checkpoints along Ukraine’s borders with Poland, Moldova, Hungary, Slovakia and Romania, and prompted a vast humanitarian response by both governments and civilians. Refugees have been sheltered in repurposed schools as well as private apartments, makeshift camps, conference centers, upscale wineries and even the home of a Moldovan lawmaker.
Some refugees believe the war will end soon, allowing them to return quickly.
If the displacement stretches out for years, it would present long-term challenges for Ukraine, which would face a brain drain of rare proportions, and for host countries where resources are limited and anti-immigrant sentiment has run strong. But it could mean opportunities; Eastern European countries like Moldova, which have experienced depopulation for decades, could suddenly find themselves boosted by a large, educated immigrant population.
Migration statistics can be imprecise, particularly in the opening stages of a chaotic new crisis, Peter Gatrell, a historian of European migration at the University of Manchester in Britain, said in a phone interview.
But to leading migration historians like Professor Gatrell, the scenes nevertheless already summon echoes of the great migrations in European history, including those in the 1940s, when several million people were displaced throughout Europe at the end of World War II.
United Nations officials have said the war could produce as many as four million refugees. If the fighting becomes protracted and Ukrainians continue to migrate at the current rate, that could be a conservative estimate, said Philipp Ther, professor of Central European history at the University of Vienna, and the author of a history of refugees in Europe since 1492.
“That would be on the scale of the postwar situation,” Professor Ther said in a telephone interview.
Large numbers of civilians on the move could restrict the Ukrainian military’s ability to maneuver, just as huge refugee flows hindered armies at the end of World War II, he said.
Such was the extent of the migration this week that secondary logjams also occurred at subsequent crossings far beyond Ukraine’s borders, including on the Moldovan-Romanian border, 70 miles west of Ukraine, as some Ukrainians attempted to push on to friends and family based in Central Europe and beyond.
In some ways, the crisis was no surprise. In Moldova, the government had planned for months for a sudden influx, the Moldovan interior minister, Ana Revenco, said in a phone interview. But the scale of the crisis was shocking: By Monday night, 70,000 people — more than double the government’s projections — had entered Moldova, a nation of just 2.6 million and one of Europe’s poorest.
The flows include hardly any men aged between 18 and 60, whom the Kyiv government has barred from leaving Ukraine unless they have a medical condition that would restrict their ability to fight.
SOURCE: The New York Times
