politicnewsbusterinsiderpostreview: A million Ukrainians have fled the country in a single week

March 3, 2022

Good afternoon. Russian forces are currently besieging port cities in the south of Ukraine in an apparent attempt to prevent the Ukrainian military from accessing key shipping hubs. It's difficult to see past the fog of war and parse all the (occasionally contradictory) information emerging from war zones, but the general consensus seems to be that Russian forces have begun to target civilian areas with increasingly indiscriminate barrages.

The ferocity of the Russian assault has driven growing numbers of people to flee Ukraine, setting the stage for one of the worst refugee crises in Europe this century. According to the UN High Commissioner for Refugees, upward of 1 million people have left the country since the fighting began a week ago. By comparison, the height of the Syrian civil war took about a month to produce 1 million refugees, eventually totaling a record 5.7 million.

In the wake of the Russian invasion, some of Europe's most notorious anti-migrant governments, including Poland and Hungary, have reversed their stances on refugees, relaxing their border policies for desperate Ukrainians escaping the war. Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orbán, for example, who has received international censure for backing brutal anti-migrant legislation, recently announced that his country would "take care of" Ukrainian refugees.

However, it's still unclear how Europe will adjust to what seems likely to draw into a longer-term conflict than either Vladimir Putin or Western observers anticipated. How long will the goodwill toward Ukrainian refugees last if the country they fled continues to remain in a state of armed conflict?

As UN High Commissioner Filippo Grandi wrote, "Nothing...can replace the need for the guns to be silenced; for dialogue and diplomacy to succeed. Peace is the only way to halt this tragedy."

—Noah Y. Kim