UNHCR names significantly fewer
Moscow: 250,000 Ukrainians fled to Russia
03/14/2022, 06:19 p.m
The war in Ukraine has generated the largest flow of refugees in Europe since 1945. The majority are fleeing west, mainly to Poland. Moscow is now reporting that a quarter of a million Ukrainians have also fled to Russia. The UNHCR speaks of significantly fewer people.
According to Moscow, almost 250,000 people have fled the country to Russia since the Russian attack on Ukraine began. Among them are almost 55,000 children, said Major General Mikhail Mizintsev of the Russian Defense Ministry, according to the Tass Agency.
In the past two days alone, 8,575 civilians, including 1,292 children, entered Russia from Ukraine and from the separatist areas recognized by Moscow as independent. More than 2.6 million people asked for evacuation help, Misintsev said. Moscow also sent more than 2,100 tons of relief supplies to the neighboring country. The figures cannot be independently verified.
Evacuations before the start of the war
The United Nations International Agency for Refugees (UNHCR) said in a March 11 report that 105,000 people had fled Ukraine to Russia. However, a week before Russia invaded Ukraine, the separatists began evacuating civilians from the self-proclaimed Luhansk and Donetsk People’s Republics, arguing that the situation there had deteriorated, Russian President Vladimir Putin said at a press conference with his Belarusian counterpart Alexander Lukashenko. It is possible that these evacuees were included in the current numbers of refugees.
So far, significantly more Ukrainians have fled in the direction of the EU. According to the border guards there, almost 1.8 million people have traveled to Poland alone since the beginning of the war. A good 200,000 people have already arrived in Slovakia and Hungary. Germany, for its part, reports almost 150,000 registered refugees.
Mizintsev also reported on military successes in the battle for the south-east Ukrainian port of Mariupol. Russian forces have destroyed almost all Ukrainian battle positions in the outskirts of the city on the Azov Sea, the major general said. He reconfirmed that the major southern Ukrainian cities of Kherson and Melitopol are fully under Russian control. The population is supplied by Russia with all the necessary resources. In both cities, there have recently been repeated protests against the Russian occupation.