Outflows from conflict the most rapid seen this century, refugee agency says

GENEVA－The United Nations refugee agency said on Thursday that 1 million people have fled Ukraine in the first week of the conflict, an exodus without precedent this century for its speed.

The tally from the UN High Commissioner for Refugees amounts to more than 2 percent of Ukraine's population－which the World Bank counted at 44 million at the end of 2020－on the move across borders in just seven days. The agency cautions that the outflows are far from finished: It has predicted that as many as 4 million people could eventually leave Ukraine, and even that projection could be revised upward.

In an email, UNHCR spokeswoman Joung-ah Ghedini-Williams wrote: "Our data indicates we passed the 1M mark" as of midnight in Central Europe, based on counts collected by national authorities.

On Twitter, UN High Commissioner Filippo Grandi wrote: "In just seven days we have witnessed the exodus of one million refugees from Ukraine to neighboring countries."

Grandi appealed for the "guns to fall silent" in Ukraine so that humanitarian aid can reach the millions more still inside the country.

Grandi's comments attest to the desperation of Ukrainians as artillery fire, exploding mortar shells and gunfire echoed across the country, and the growing concerns across the UN system at agencies like the World Health Organization and the UN Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs－which launched an appeal for funds with the UNHCR on Tuesday.

The day-by-day figures pointed to the dizzying speed of the evacuation. After more than 82,000 people left on the first day of Russia's "special military operation" in Ukraine on Feb 24, each day after that brought at least 117,000 new refugees, hitting a peak of nearly 200,000 on Tuesday alone, based on the latest UNHCR count. Some longtime agency workers accustomed to dealing with refugee crises said they had never seen anything like this exodus.

Syria, whose civil war erupted in 2011, remains the country with the largest refugee outflows－nearly 5.7 million people, according to UNHCR's figures. But even at the swiftest rate of flight out of that country, in early 2013, it took at least three months for 1 million refugees to leave Syria.

Two years later, in 2015, hundreds of thousands of Syrian and other refugees who had mostly been in Turkey fled to Europe, prompting disarray in the European Union over its response and at times skirmishes and pushbacks at some national borders.

Biggest crisis

So far, UN officials and others have generally praised the response from Ukraine's neighbors, which have opened homes, gymnasiums and other facilities to take in the refugees.

UNHCR spokeswoman Shabia Mantoo said on Wednesday that "at this rate" the outflows from Ukraine could make it the source of "the biggest refugee crisis this century".

According to the latest figures on the UNHCR's online data portal, which had shown 934,000 refugees early on Thursday, more than half of the refugees from Ukraine had gone to neighboring Poland－over 505,000－and more than 116,000 opted for Hungary to the south.

Moldova had taken in more than 79,000 and 71,200 had gone to Slovakia.

Ghedini-Williams said the figures on the data portal reflected a count through midafternoon in Europe, but the agency had received estimates of additional arrivals through the rest of the day and into the evening.

Agencies Via Xinhua