The alarming humanitarian crisis in Ukraine

Dar es Salaam. The humanitarian crisis in Ukraine keeps escalating as war rages on almost a month after Russia invaded the Eastern European country. This crisis, which threatens to affect tens of millions of people, was the subject of a press conference held in Dar es Salaam organised by envoys representing 8 European Union (EU) countries in Tanzania.  

Before the Russian invasion, Ukraine was constituted of 37 million Ukrainians. According to the United Nations Refugee Agency, more than 3.9 million of them have fled their country. On the other hand, 6.5 million Ukrainians have also moved to the western part of Ukraine. However, if Russia decides to attack this part as well, the number of refugees leaving the country could increase to 10 million in the near future.

90 percent of the refugees are women and children. In fact, Ukrainian men between the ages of 18 and 20 years old are not allowed to leave and must stay to defend their country. According to UNICEF, more than 1.8 million children are among the refugees who have fled the country, and 2.5 million have been displaced within Ukraine, making them a very vulnerable population.
Concerning the hosting of the Ukrainian refugees in the initial stages of refuge, it is mainly Ukraine’s neighbouring countries that welcomed them. The Polish Ambassador highlighted that “about 2 million Ukrainians are in Poland right now”. According to figures from the UN Refugee Agency, this is more than half of the refugees. Two-thirds of the Ukrainians would like to stay in this country.
Meanwhile, Romania and Moldavia host 587,000 and 381,000 refugees respectively. In these cases, most of the refugees intend not to stay but to continue moving. Lastly, Hungary with 349,000 and Slovakia with 272,000 Ukrainians. It has to be noted that 271,000 Ukrainian refugees are also in Russia, in addition to 113,000 others who crossed borders from the pro-Russian territories of Donetsk and Lugansk.
Some of these migrants are expected to leave the Eastern countries in order to be scattered according to the reception capacities of other European countries. For instance, in Poland, 200,000 refugees have been evacuated by trains to other hosting countries. It was mostly travellers in direction to Berlin, Prague, and Vienne. It is difficult to know the exact number of refugees who left their first hosting countries, as the European Schengen area does not have internal border controls.

The European Union reacted to this humanitarian crisis. “It is the first time that the EU decided to use her own budget to supply the Ukrainian army,” said the Ambassador of the EU delegation to Tanzania, Mr Manfredo Fanti. This military aid represents an amount of 450 million euros. This is a European first and could be a step further for a common defence policy. The question of Ukraine’s integration into the EU has been raised too.

Moreover, European sanctions against Russia were decided within the Union. Restrictive measures against banks and other financial institutions, Russian oligarchs, and air links have been cornered. Diplomatic initiatives have also been lined up to condemn Putin at the United Nations.

Finally, the European Union has also established a temporary protection status for Ukrainian refugees, thus exempting them from European migration rules. This status gives them the right to access a visa, work, receive medical care and go to school in every country in the EU. In addition, the Union is planning to give 500 million euros for humanitarian aid.

The next challenge for the EU would be to coordinate their hosting actions by showing solidarity, and by distributing refugees according to their reception capacities. For the moment, some countries such as Poland are participating a lot more in the refugees’ reception, leading Warsaw to ask for 3 billion euros in order to bear the cost of all the refugees on its territory.
Following these efforts by the EU, members of the continental bloc called on African countries to join their efforts in order to respond to the humanitarian crisis and to strongly condemn Russia’s invasion of Ukraine on grounds of respecting its territorial sovereignty.