A 25-year-old Ukrainian mother staggered into Poland on Friday, carrying her three-year-old son, who is sick with cancer, in her arms. She was safe from the bombs dropped by Russia, but depressed after being separated from her husband by order of Kiev, which mandated that all able-bodied men remain in the country to resist the war.
“He’s not just my husband, he’s my life and my breadwinner,” says Olha Zapotochna, one of tens of thousands of Ukrainians, mostly women and children, who have flocked to Poland, Hungary and neighboring countries. “I understand that our country needs men to fight, but I need him more.”
The exodus from Ukraine intensified on Friday, amid growing fears that the Kremlin intends to impose its will far beyond the east of the country, the scene of what Putin claims is a “genocide” of ethnic Russians. More than 50,000 people have already fled the country, according to the director of the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR), Filippo Grandi. The agency believes that up to 100,000 have already been displaced.
Poland’s border service said 29,000 people arrived from Ukraine on Thursday and many more on Friday, causing waits of more than 12 hours at some crossing points. More than 26,000 Ukrainians fled to Moldova and 10,000 to Romania.
Among those who fled to Poland on Friday, entering a border post in Medyka, were ethnic Russians like Oksana Aleksova, as shocked as their countrymen by the conflict, the wars of versions and lies, the political propaganda.
Aleksova’s husband is a retired police officer and an ethnic Ukrainian who remained in the country. She escaped with her 11-year-old daughter after spending the night waiting in a line that stretched for miles. The woman says that her town, Khmelnitskii, in western Ukraine, was not hit directly, but that Russian bombs fell on a military airport in a nearby town.
Aleksova predicts that Moscow’s forces “will eventually win, of course” because they have far more soldiers and better equipment than Ukraine’s. But for her, Putin’s goal “is not just to defeat Ukraine – it’s to scare the whole world.”
It remains to be seen whether Putin will succeed. But his implied threat to use nuclear weapons against any foreign countries that intervene on Ukraine’s behalf reinforced an already solid consensus among NATO members — even the most strongly anti-Russian — not to put troops in Ukraine.
But as Ukrainians crossed the Polish border in large numbers, Warsaw announced on Friday that an “ammunition convoy” was heading in the opposite direction. “We support the Ukrainians and we firmly oppose Russian aggression,” Defense Minister Mariusz Błaszczak said.
Small groups of men who said they were returning to fight were also entering Ukraine. “We are going to defeat Russia,” shouted a middle-aged man carrying a canvas backpack as he passed the Polish border guards.
Behind them, German Viktor Dyk was trying to make his way to Kiev to rescue his pregnant Ukrainian wife and three children. He looked terrified, but he said he was willing to take a risk to save his family.
Up to 5 million Ukrainians could flee to neighboring countries if the war drags on, forcing the European Union – which in 2015 almost buckled under the weight of a migration crisis involving 1.5 million people – to face another influx of foreigners, now possibly much bigger.
But in contrast to the previous flow and last year’s crisis around would-be refugees crossing Belarus to enter the EU, the governments of Poland and Hungary, the most hostile to migrants, have generally welcomed to Ukrainians.
When migrants from the Middle East and Afghanistan tried to stealthily cross the Belarusian border last year, Polish security forces repelled them with batons. At least 12 died in the border forests.
Refugees arriving from Ukraine are being greeted with smiles, hot drinks and transport to the nearest train station. Police officers were handing out fruit, donuts and sandwiches in the crowded waiting room.
Unlike the migrants that Polish guards stopped from crossing the border last year, Ukrainians, mostly Christian and white, have the legal right to enter Poland and other EU countries without a visa. Almost 1 million of them live in Poland.
And those who suffer with Russia awaken feelings of solidarity in the former communist lands of eastern and central Europe, whose populations have bitter memories of living under Moscow’s rule.
In 2015, Poland’s right-wing populist government was at the forefront of a movement to resist the European Union’s liberal migration policy, as was Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orbán. Now, however, the same government is organizing reception centers and temporary accommodation for Ukrainians.
“We will accept as many as necessary,” Deputy Defense Minister Marcin Ociepa said on Monday.
Ludmila Viitovich crossed on Friday with her two children. After leaving Lviv, a city so far spared by conflict, she said she was pleasantly surprised to find Poles so welcoming.
Zapotochna, the mother with her sick son, says she decided with her husband that she would take the child to safety after missiles destroyed an airport near their home in Ivano-Frankovsk, southwest Ukraine, on Monday. . The drive to the Polish border took 28 hours.
“I hope we can go back. I need to go back. This is not my country,” she says, while her mother-in-law, who lives in Poland and welcomed her at the border, tries to comfort the sick baby. “We’re still living in the 21st century — or so I hope.”
