Central European countries on Ukraine’s western border are making preparations for a potential influx of millions of refugees in the event of a major Russian invasion of Ukraine.
Poland in particular is bracing for various scenarios if Moscow invades Ukraine, according to its deputy interior minister, Maciej Wąsik. “We have to be prepared for a wave of up to a million people,” he told Polish radio.
Poland is already home to about 2 million Ukrainians, many of whom have moved since the 2014 conflict and taken advantage of a relatively easy scheme to gain work permits. The government has said it is planning to house Ukrainian refugees in hostels, dormitories and sports facilities.
Last Saturday, Krzysztof Kosiński, the mayor of Ciechanów, a town in north-central Poland, said on Twitter he had been asked by authorities to indicate “the list of accommodation facilities for refugees, the number of people it would be possible to accommodate, the costs involved and the time for adaptation of buildings with a recommendation of up to 48 hours”.
It is hard to say how many Ukrainians would flee a potential conflict. Many people from the conflict zone in eastern Ukraine have already left for other parts of the country or for Russia, while others have left the country in search of better-paid work.
“Because we now have visa-free travel with Europe, people who wanted to leave have already done so,” said Ukraine’s finance minister, Serhiy Marchenko, in an interview in Kyiv.
“If Russia escalates and people decide to go to Europe to find a safer place, it’s likely to be a smaller portion of people,” he said.
However, there are many different scenarios of how a Russian invasion may unfold, and if the warnings from US and British intelligence of a fully fledged invasion and drive to Kyiv by the Russians come to pass, it seems unlikely to be without huge casualties and displacements.
“We are following the situation very closely; however, the situation remains unpredictable,” said Natalia Prokopchuk, a communications and advocacy officer for UNHCR in Europe.
“In the meantime, the UN and its humanitarian partners in Ukraine hope that the ongoing tensions will not escalate and will be resolved through diplomatic and political means among all concerned parties,” she said.
Other countries in eastern Europe are preparing for a potential influx of refugees if Russia attacks Ukraine.
Romania’s interior minister, Lucian Bode, told TV B1 its government was considering the prospect of “hundreds of thousands of refugees in an uncontrolled influx”.
“We are currently analysing how many refugee camps we can install in a relatively short time: 10, 12, 24 hours. We are analysing existing lodging capacities in border counties but we are also discussing the second stage, with neighbouring counties, and the third stage across the country,” he said.
Slovakia’s interior minister, Roman Mikulec, said his government also stood ready to play a part.
Rights groups have welcomed countries’ willingness to help, but some drew comparisons with the treatment of other refugees, in a part of Europe where politicians have often played on anti-refugee sentiment.
After the Belarusian president, Alexander Lukashenko, organised the movement of refugees with the promise of a safe passage to Europe last year, thousands of people were caught by Polish border guards in the forests near the border and illegally and violently pushed back to Belarus. Late in January, Warsaw announced it has started building a €353m (£293m) wall along its frontier with Belarus, aimed at preventing Syrian and Iraqi asylum seekers from entering the country.
A spokesperson for the Ocalenie Foundation, which supports refugees living in Poland, commended the commitment, but said it showed a double standard. “We wonder why they didn’t do any moves like that during the crisis on the border. This shows a general trend that in Poland some asylum seekers are favoured over others,” said the spokesperson.
Wąsik described Ukrainians as “real refugees” in need of help and added that his government “absolutely won’t say no to helping them, in line with the Geneva conventions”.
Grupa Granica, a Polish network of NGOs monitoring the situation on the border with Belarus, said in a statement: “For almost half a year the same government has violently pushed back people from many other countries trying to cross through Belarusian border. It is racist to differentiate people and their access to basic migration procedures based on the country of their origin. Why don’t they have access to the same treatment?”
In the meantime, authorities in the self-declared Luhansk and Donetsk people’s republics have ordered an evacuation ostensibly to protect citizens from a planned Ukrainian attack, although there is no evidence Kyiv is planning any such thing. According to observers, the move appears designed to create a pretext to launch a Russian intervention.
