UN Geneva - Multimedia Newsroom : Bi-weekly press briefing: Ukraine Update

Ukraine invasion sees refugee numbers pass 3.5 million, Haiti impact feared

Nearly a month since Russia invaded Ukraine, more than 3.5 million refugees have fled the country, UN humanitarians said on Tuesday, citing massive needs among the new arrivals.

“Now we’ve passed 3.5 million mark, in terms of refugees, the overall number is 3.557 million refugees, and this is really another tragic milestone for the people of Ukraine and it’s been achieved in just under one month,” said Matthew Saltmarsh, spokesperson for the UN refugee agency, UNHCR.

Confirming UNHCR data, the World Health Organization’s (WHO) representative in Poland, Dr Paloma Cuchi said that Ukraine’s neighbour had welcomed “around two million people, this is about 61 per cent of the refugees are in Poland”. About two-thirds of them said that they wanted to stay in Poland “because it’s close to home and they are thinking of going back if the situation permits”.

Amid ongoing reports that Russian shelling has continued to target heavily built-up areas inside Ukraine, latest WHO information confirmed 62 attacks on health care inside Ukraine since Russian forces invaded on 24 February.

“As you can imagine access to health care in Ukraine is very restricted,” Dr Cuchi said. “And on top of that, refugees are coming from a long, difficult and dangerous journey, you know, until they arrive at the border of Poland. Children are travelling for days without proper food, without the proper water. They are tired, they are worried.”

Many refugees also have chronic health care needs which require urgent assistance, as they can no longer be treated inside Ukraine because of the deadly threat of violence, the WHO official explained. “There is a tremendous number of senior refugees that come, without, that have been without their medications for days, they come with decompensated diabetes, with blood pressure with other health problems, and of course, we have women, pregnant women who are without prenatal care.”

New arrivals from Ukraine receive assistance in reception centres. Common complaints include fever, diarrhoea, hypothermia, upper-respiratory tract infections, cardiac arrest, mental and emotional distress.

“Some refugees with long-term, chronic, and rare diseases need to be referred immediately to trusted hospitals in Poland, the EU, or elsewhere where beds are available and receive treatment,” the UN agency noted.

Early WHO estimates indicate that the war has left 500,000 refugees with a mental disorder and around 30,000 with severe mental disorders, based on the experience of other conflict settings.

Inside Ukraine, where some 6.5 million people have been displaced internally, UNHCR responded to concerns that civilians from the shattered city of Mariupol had been transported to Russia against their will.

“Of course we’re aware of these reports, but we’re not in a position unfortunately to confirm anything,” said spokesperson Matthew Saltmarsh. “What we would say is that any transfer, movement of people, would have to be done voluntarily and in dignity. As I said in the last briefing, UNHCR has not been involved in the negotiations of safe passage for civilians.”

Reflecting the global commodity price crunch made worse by Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, UN humanitarians in Haiti warned that it would likely continue to hurt vulnerable people in the highly import-dependent island nation.

In an alert on Tuesday, the UN World Food Programme (WFP) warned that hunger levels there were “rising unabated (amid) persistent political instability, growing inflation and recurrent disasters”.

Needs remain high in the southern part of the country where communities are still reeling from a devastating earthquake that hit in August 2021. In the north, heavy flooding in January hit Haitians hard, prompting WFP to scale up its response with daily food deliveries.

“We estimate that over 40 per cent of the population is food insecure among which 1.5 million require an emergency response,” said Pierre Honnorat, WFP Country Director in Haiti, citing the latest Integrated Food Security Phase Classification (IPC) forecast, valid from March to June 2022.

He explained that the wheat that Haiti imports “is mainly coming from Russia and then coming from Canada as well...so if the wheat flour is going up, you will see a problem and as I said, the price has already multiplied by five in two years. So, we can only expect that it will multiply again.”

Faced with extreme hunger, the WFP official warned that individuals are at heighted risk of sexual exploitation to secure enough food to eat. “It’s everything about those coping mechanisms that the population has to go for. And it’s different, they have to change their diet, they have to reduce their meals; but it also brings them to violence, it also leads some of them to prostitution.”

ends

Bi-weekly press briefing:Ukraine Update - Haiti Impact UNHCR WHO WFP 22 March 2022

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