UN warns refugees from Ukraine would be the biggest crisis of this century

Kyiv/Brussels: Over a million Ukrainian citizens have taken refuge in other countries after Russia invaded Ukraine. The United Nations has warned that if the situation of refugees remains constant, it would lead to the biggest refugee crisis of the 21st century. As per the information shared by the UN High Commission for Refugees (UNHCR), more than 2% of Ukraine’s population has moved out of the country in the last seven days. Last month itself, Linda Thomas-Greenfield, the US Ambassador to the United Nations, had warned of the possibility of having more than 5 million refugees from Ukraine.

The Ukrainian population rushed to leave their country after Russia attacked Ukraine last week. Many people from the capital Kyiv and the eastern city of Kharkiv have left and are trying to reach other countries by cars and trains. A large number of Ukrainian refugees are pouring into the neighbouring countries Poland, Slovakia, Hungary, Romania, and Moldova. The United Nations informed that thousands of refugees are gathering on the borders of these countries every hour.

More than a million citizens have left the country in the last seven days since the beginning of the war. The population of Ukraine is 45 million, out of which more than 2% are refugees now. UNHCR said that such large numbers of citizens leaving a country are unprecedented. Filippo Grandy, chief of the UNHCR, said that this is the first time in his tenure of four decades that he was witnessing such an exodus from a country.

UNHCR spokeswoman Shabia Mantoo warned that if the flow of migration continues in the same manner, it will be the biggest crisis of this century. UNHCR and many other organisations had predicted that there would be nearly 4 to 5 million refugees leaving Ukraine. The United Nations informed that more than 50% of the Ukrainian citizens leaving the country had taken refuge in Poland.

Nearly 5.7 million Syrian citizens had left Syria and taken refuge in other countries during the Syrian war in the last decade.