Ukraine war refugees top 5 million
Warsaw: After spending weeks with no electricity or water in the basement of her family's home in Ukraine, Viktoriya Savyichkina made a daring escape from the besieged city of Mariupol with her 9- and 14-year-old daughters.
Their dwelling for now is a huge convention centre in Poland's capital. Savyichkina said she saw a photo of the home in Mariupol destroyed. From a camp bed in a foreign country, the 40-year-old bookeeper thinks about restarting her and her children's lives from square one. I don't even know where we are going, how it will turn out, Savyichkina said.
"I would like to go home, of course. Maybe here, I will enjoy it in Poland.
With the war in Ukraine approaching eight weeks, more than 5 million people have fled the country since Russian troops invaded on Feb 24, the UN refugee agency reported Wednesday. When the number reached 4 million on March 30, the exodus exceeded the worst-case predictions of the Geneva-based UN High Commissioner for Refugees.
The even bigger milestone in Europe's biggest refugee crisis since World War II was reached as Russia unleashed a full-scale offensive in eastern Ukraine that will disrupt and end more lives.
Ukraine had a pre-war population of 44 million, and UNHCR says the conflict has displaced more than 7 million people within Ukraine along with the 5.03 million who had left as of Wednesday.
According to the agency, 13 million people are believed to be trapped in the war-affected areas of Ukraine.
We've seen about a quarter of Ukraine's population, more than 12 million people in total, have been forced to flee their homes, so this is a staggering amount of people, UNHCR spokesperson Shabia Mantoo told The Associated Press.
More than half of the refugees, over 2.8 million, fled at least at first to Poland. They are eligible for national ID numbers that entitle them to work, to free health care, schooling and bonuses for families with children. Although many of have stayed there, an unknown number have traveled on to other countries. Savyichkina said she is thinking about taking her daughters to Germany.
Further south, Hungary has emerged as a major transit point for Ukrainian refugees. Out of more than 465,000 who arrived, some 16,400 have applied for protected status, meaning they want to stay.
Meanwhile, Russia hurled its military might against Ukrainian cities and towns and poured more troops into the war, seeking to slice the country in two in a potentially pivotal battle for control of the eastern industrial heartland of coal mines and factories.
In Mariupol, the devastated port city in the Donbas, Ukrainian troops said the Russian military dropped heavy bombs to flatten what was left of a sprawling steel plant believed to be the defenders' last holdout and hit a hospital where hundreds were staying.
