1M fled Ukraine within a week: UN

The UN refugee agency said that 1 million people have now fled Ukraine since Russia’s invasion less than a week ago, an exodus without precedent in 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 been predicted that 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.”

According to the latest figures on UNHCR’s online data portal, which still showed 934,000 refugees early Thursday, more than half of the refugees from Ukraine had gone to neighboring Poland - over 505,000 - and more than 116,000 had gone to 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 mid-afternoon in Europe, but the agency had received estimates of additional arrivals through the rest of the day and into the evening.

ARR