The number of war refugees from Ukraine has increased to more than 3.7 million. According to its website, the UN refugee agency UNHCR has recorded 3,725,806 people fleeing Ukraine since the Russian invasion began on February 24 at noon on Friday. This represented an increase of over 50,000 refugees from the previous day.
According to the UN, more than ten million people in Ukraine have had to leave their homes. Accordingly, 6.5 million people currently live as internally displaced persons in Ukraine.
According to the UN, about 90% of Ukraine’s refugees are women and children. The United Nations Children’s Fund, Unicef, assumes that there are 1.5 million underage refugees in the war-torn country alone.
Before the start of the Russian war of aggression, some 37 million people lived in Ukraine — not including the Crimean peninsula on the Black Sea, annexed by Russia in 2014, and the pro-Russian breakaway areas in the east of the country.
By far the largest number of refugees from Ukraine were taken in by Poland. More than 2.2 million people from Ukraine have arrived in the neighboring country since the invasion began, according to UNHCR. About 200,000 people used the free offer of Polish railways for Ukrainian refugees to travel to other countries. Even before the start of the war, around 1.5 million Ukrainians lived in Poland.
Hundreds of thousands of Ukrainians have also fled across the border into Romania and Moldova since the invasion began. According to UNHCR, Hungary had taken in over 336,000 refugees from Ukraine as of Thursday, and Slovakia had taken in over 263,000 so far.
In Germany, the number of refugees from Ukraine has apparently already passed the 300,000 mark. The integration commissioner of the German federal government, Reem Alabali-Radovan, gave this number to the “Neue Osnabrücker Zeitung” (Saturday edition). On Friday morning, the German Interior Ministry spoke of 253,157 registered refugees.
UNHCR estimated the number of people seeking refuge in Russia at 271,254 as of Tuesday. In addition, around 113,000 people from the pro-Russian breakaway regions of Donetsk and Luhansk arrived in Russia three days before the start of the war. Moscow said on Friday that Russia had taken in nearly 420,000 refugees from Ukraine, including 88,000 children and 9,000 foreigners.