More than four million Ukrainians have now fled the country to escape Russia’s war, the United Nations said yesterday.
UNHCR, the UN refugee agency, said 4,019,287 Ukrainians had fled across the country’s borders since the February 24 invasion, with more than 2.3 million having headed west into Poland.
“Refugees from Ukraine are now four million, five weeks after the start of the Russian attack,” UNHCR chief Filippo Grandi said on Twitter.
“I have just arrived in Ukraine. In Lviv I will discuss with the authorities, the UN and other partners ways to increase our support to people affected and displaced by this senseless war.”
The number of refugees has surpassed UNHCR’s initial estimate that the war could create up to four million.
The agency said the speed and scale of the displacement is unprecedented in Europe since World War II.
Women and children account for 90 percent of those who have fled. Ukrainian men aged 18 to 60 are eligible for military call-up and cannot leave.
The UN’s International Organisation for Migration (IOM) said that in addition to Ukrainian refugees, close to 200,000 non-Ukrainians living, studying and working in the country have also left.
And as of March 16, some 6.48 million people were estimated to be internally displaced within Ukraine, according to an IOM representative survey.
“They need urgent life-saving aid,” the organisation said yesterday.
“In response to the war in Ukraine, IOM has scaled up its effort to prevent the trafficking of persons both in the country and among those moving throughout the region,” it added.
The humanitarian crisis in Ukraine caused by Russia’s war of aggression is “catastrophe on top of catastrophe,” said the Executive Director of the World Food Programme (WFP), David Beasley.
“Even before the war in Ukraine there were severe hunger crises in places including Yemen or parts of Africa,” Beasley told the Security Council in New York.
He said it was only with great effort that sufficient help could be given.
“Now the crisis in Ukraine has come on top of that. In a few weeks the country has gone from ‘breadbasket’ to now ‘breadline’.
“The consequences worldwide could be the worst since World War II in terms of feeding the hungry,” the WFP head said.
Russian President Vladimir Putin was misinformed by advisers about his military’s performance in Ukraine and the effect of sanctions on his country’s economy, a White House spokeswoman said, citing unspecified U.S. intelligence.
“We have information that Putin felt misled by the Russian military, which has resulted in persistent tension between Putin and his military leadership,” White House Communications Director Kate Bedingfield said in a briefing.
“We believe that Putin is being misinformed by his advisers about how badly the Russian military is performing, and how the Russian economy is being crippled by sanctions because his senior advisers are too afraid to tell him the truth,” she said.