GENEVA (AP) — The UN Migration Agency said on Friday that nearly 6.5 million people have been displaced inside Ukraine, on top of the 3.2 million who have already left the country.
This means that about a quarter of Ukraine’s 44 million people have been forced to leave their homes.
In just three weeks, the International Organization for Migration estimates that Ukraine is rapidly approaching the level of displaced people due to the devastating war in Syria, which has displaced some 13 million people from their homes both at home and abroad.
The findings are in a paper released on Friday by the United Nations Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs.
The projections also showed that “more than 12 million people are estimated to be stuck in the affected areas or unable to leave due to heightened security risks, destruction of bridges and roads, and a lack of resources or information on where to find safety and shelter. ”
The newspaper cites the IOM data as “a good indication of the scale of internal displacement in Ukraine, which is estimated at 6.48 million internally displaced persons in Ukraine as of March 16.”
UNHCR, the United Nations refugee agency, said the fighting that followed Russia’s February 24 invasion of Ukraine sparked the worst refugee crisis in Europe since World War II.
“According to these estimates, approximately half of the country is either internally displaced, or stuck in the affected areas, or unable to leave, or has already fled to neighboring countries,” he said, referring to Ukraine’s population of about 44 million before the outbreak. war.
The newspaper reported that as of Wednesday, 9.56 million people had been displaced by the war, and another 2.2 million were considering leaving. The IOM estimates that more than 3 million people have fled abroad as of Wednesday.
More than 3.2 million people have left Ukraine, according to the latest UNHCR data released on Friday.