Warsaw, Poland — So far, about 120,000 people have fled Ukraine to Poland and other neighboring countries following the invasion of Russia, the UN refugee agency said on Saturday.
Poland has declared that it will open its borders to Ukrainians who flee, even if they do not have official documents.
On Saturday, government officials also said the country picked up people injured in the war in Mostiska, western Ukraine, and sent a hospital train to Warsaw for treatment.
The hospital train departs from the border town of Przemysl and is equipped with five vehicles modified to transport the injured and four vehicles with humanitarian aid for the Lviv district of Ukraine.
“Currently, about 116,000 people are crossing the border. This may rise, it changes every minute,” said Shabia Mantu, a spokeswoman for the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees. “It’s very fluid and changes over time.”
Authorities expect that up to 4 million Ukrainians can escape if the situation worsens.
After Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky banned military-aged men from leaving the country on Thursday, it arrived primarily women, children, and the elderly.
Mantoo said that most were heading to neighboring Poland, Moldova, Hungary, Romania and Slovakia, some to Belarus, from which some Russian troops invaded Ukraine.
She didn’t immediately know the details of the country numbers, but the number of arrivals in Poland was overwhelmingly high, with Russia’s first invasion of Ukraine in 2014, booming European Union neighbors. economic.
The Polish government said Saturday morning that more than 100,000 Ukrainians had crossed the Polish-Ukrainian border in the last 48 hours.
Crossing the Medica border, a line of cars waiting to enter Poland stretched 15 km (9 miles) to Ukraine, according to Polish broadcaster TVN24.
Vanessa Gera
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