From Ukraine to Greece, looking for … a better world

Ukrainian citizens board buses every day to escape the vortex of war. Dozens of itineraries are performed to and from Greece. Women, children and men non-conscripts disembark with what they have managed to fit in their luggage and especially with the expectation that they will be able to return quickly to their homeland.

Diana, who is in her second decade of life with tears in her eyes, describes in APE-MPE what prevailed in the city of Lviv, where she comes from, shortly before her departure: “Every two or three hours the sirens sound and people run from their homes to hide. I have left my brothers, my aunts, my grandmother there. “My brothers stayed to protect our villages,” she explains in good Greek because of her collaboration with domestic tourism companies. Those Ukrainian citizens choose Greece as their refuge they do it because they have acquaintances. But not everyone speaks the language. 8-year-old Sasha arrived in our country accompanied by his grandmother who has lived in Greece for years and went to pick him up from the Romanian-Ukrainian border. His parents were left behind after his father was called to fight. His grandmother tries to calm his insecurity by taking him for a walk in the sea.

“Young children do not know from war. “They are afraid,” said Galina, who has lived in Greece for 13 years and waited anxiously for her relatives to arrive from Ternopil in western Ukraine. “I hope everything goes well … Everyone calms down. “No one will ever forget that.” The same is confirmed by Margarita’s compatriot who speaks daily with friends and acquaintances who stayed to defend their lands: “They are stubborn. “Everyone is fighting … A factory that has stopped working now makes Molotov cocktails and distributes them to people and when tanks and other war vehicles pass by they throw them out of their apartments”, she describes speaking to the Athenian News Agency while waiting for her daughter from Chernivtsi to arrive.

Seeing their country plunge into uncharted waters, more and more Ukrainians are looking for the first route that will take them to a better world without hostilities. According to the United Nations, 1.2 million people have left Ukraine. In a statement, the UN High Commissioner for Refugees, Filippo Grady, said: “I have worked in emergency situations for refugee needs for almost 40 years. Rarely have I seen an exit as fast as this. Hour by minute, minute by minute, more and more people are fleeing the horrific reality of violence. Countless have been displaced within the country. “And if there is no immediate end to the conflict, millions more will be forced to flee Ukraine.”

Giannis Lathyris works as a bus driver and during the last ten days the images he saw on the Romanian-Ukrainian border make him bend: “No matter how hard one is when one sees these images, one becomes a lamb. Women and small children to see them crying … The Romanians gave them food, water, made tents so that people could sleep. Our journey lasted thirty hours. We were two drivers. When one was driving, the other was talking to people to make them feel better and safer. They come to Greece to find relatives and friends. They had no choice. What to do? “Did they sit and pound them?” reports.

On the first day of the war, 82,000 people left Ukraine. At least 117,000 new refugees are registered every day since February 24, according to the UNHCR census. 52.4% are located in Poland (https://data2.unhcr.org/en/situations/ukraine). According to the American magazine Time, two years have passed since the outbreak of the war in Syria until the largest flows of refugees are recorded. But again, it took three months for a million people to leave. The representative of the UN High Commissioner for Refugees, Sambia Mantou, stressed that with “these rhythms” Ukraine could be the source of “the biggest refugee crisis of the century”.

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