1.36 million people have now left Ukraine. UN Commissioner for Refugees Filippo Grandi: “This is the fastest moving refugee crisis in Europe since WW2.”
The total number of refugees leaving Ukraine in ten days is now greater than the total numbers of people who claimed asylum *throughout Europe* in the whole of the 2015 refugee crisis.
Over three quarters of a million people in Poland alone.
For context around 7 million fled Syria during the civil war.
Grandi now upping the total numbers of Ukrainian refugees to 1.5 million. That’s equivalent to 3.5% of 🇺🇦 population.
As I said earlier, what is remarkable is how organic and spontaneous the response is from so many Poles and Central Europeans. No one told them to do it. They’ve just done it themselves. Without being maudlin, it is pure goodness.
Humbling hour spent in the home of Kasia and Marcin. They’re just one of the enormous numbers of Polish families who’ve taken in a Ukrainian family, in this case Oksana and her two boys. A family of four has become a family of seven overnight-and an open ended commitment at that.
Poland has taken in over a million Ukrainians without refugee camps and that is down to the extraordinary generosity of Polish families like K&M. Without that charity Oksana and her boys would have had nowhere to go. K&M tell us lots of families in their street have done the same
Kasia & Marcin signed up with the council saying they’d host a family (they’d agreed to do it even before the war started). On Wed they got a call asking if they could pick up Oksana’s family from the station. They agreed. They’d never met before that day. Now they live together.
Another day another station. This time Rzeszów, filled with refugees to take them to Krakow, Warsaw and beyond,
Every carriage packed to the rafters
Train to Krakow. At this time on a Monday guard says this train would normally be almost empty. Instead it’s taking refugees to the rest of Poland and beyond.
Polish Border Guard say that the million threshold was breached at at 8pm: “a million tragedies, a million forced from their homes by the war. One million people who after crossing the border heard from the Polish Border Guard- ‘you’re safe.’”
Lots of small, hopeful stories of solidarity from the border. Ran into a group of German paramedics from Frankfurt. They’ve travelled 11 hours in their ambulance bus to help, a vehicle they’ve had for 30 years. At the end of the day they’re handing over the bus to the Ukrainians.
They’re not even sure what’s happening to it or where it’s going: “i just know they need it far more than we do”, the paramedics’ team leader tells me.
This is their weekend, they’re back at work in Frankfurt at 6am Monday morning.
Today I interviewed the UK Ambassador to Poland about why it is that the UK has adopted such s different approach and policy to Ukrainian refugees to virtually the rest of Europe. Tune into @BBCNewsnight at 2230 to see what she said.
To be clear the Ambassador doesn’t make UK government refugee policy. Nonetheless as HMG’s representative on the ground on the border I asked her why there is such a disparity between the UK govt policy’s on refugees and that of vast majority of the rest of Europe.