LONDON: The number of refugees pouring from Ukraine into Europe is expected to be three times larger than those who fled Syria for the continent in 2015-16, the EU’s foreign affairs chief has warned.
“When it was the Syria crisis in 2015 to 2016, we were talking about one-and-a-half million people. Now it’s going to be much more,” said Josep Borrell, adding that 1.5 million people had already crossed into the EU in the last week alone.
“We must mobilize all the resources of the EU to help those countries receiving people, all the countries bordering Ukraine. We will need more schools, more reception centers, more of everything.”
Borrell said up to 5 million people could flee Ukraine to EU nations, with some 200,000 exiting for Poland and other nearby member states in the first 24 hours of the conflict.
“We very much fear there will be 5 million refugees in Europe. This is a reasonable estimate and unprecedented since the Second World War,” he added.
Brussels has warned that “18 million people will be hit by the conflict in Ukraine,” almost half the country’s population of 41 million, which would create an enormous emergency situation with extensive humanitarian demands.
The UN Refugee Agency said it had recorded 1,735,068 refugees on Monday, with 200,000 more added since Sunday.
Poland is hosting the majority of the refugees, caring for 1 million of them. There are more than 180,000 in Hungary and 128,000 in Slovakia.
