Civilian Evacuations Continue In Irpin The Day After Deadly Shelling.Photo: Chris McGrath/Getty Images
Fleeingbombs and bulletsthat have alreadykilled hundredsof civilians,more than 2 million peoplehave crossed Ukraine’s borders sinceRussia invadedless than two weeks ago — creating one of the largest and fastest-growing flights of refugees this century.
“They’ve gone through hell,” says Max Rantz-McDonald, a Los Angeles-based events director and adventure traveler, who visited all five crossings with Poland, which has absorbed a majority of the refugees, to collect and distribute relief on both sides of the border.
“They drove what usually is a four-hour drive — it took them 28 hours. They had to just abandon their cars because all the cars ahead on the road were abandoned or they ran out of petrol,” Rantz-McDonald told PEOPLE recently of the refugees he saw during his work. “Stations aren’t being replenished.”
Marek Stus, emergencies director for humanitarian organizationPeople in Need, who visited crossings in Slovakia and Hungary, says people there walked for up to seven days to escape the violence unfolding in Ukraine.
“They have covered an incredible distance on foot,” he says.
Travelers reach the border in a state of shock and exhaustion, Rantz-McDonald says, only to then face wait times of up to 30 hours in low-freezing temperatures.
Half the refugees are children, which makes the current crisis a “dark historical first,“according to a spokesperson for UNICEF, the United Nations' children’s organization.
- For more on the emerging refugee crisis in Ukraine and how President Volodymyr Zelenskyy’s life and acting career shaped his unexpected moment as a wartime leader,subscribe now to PEOPLEor pick up this week’s issue, on newsstands Friday.
People stand with their luggage as they wait to be relocated from the temporary shelter for refugees in a former shopping center between the Ukrainian border and the Polish city of Przemysl on March 8.LOUISA GOULIAMAKI/AFP via Getty Images
“Not all adults could leave, so they find whoever was going over — a relative or a neighbor — and they’d give their child to that adult to bring over with them,” Rantz-McDonald says of encountering mostly women and kids at refugee transit centers, which he says were converted gyms and warehouses that hold thousands.
Rantz-McDonald spoke of a woman with four children who left her oldest, an 18-year-old son, behind at the border: “They wouldn’t let him through, so he had to travel back toward [the capital] Kyiv, to a town called Sumy.”
The young man is now “on his own” and “brought into the army,” Rantz-McDonald says.
WithTeam Ukraine Love, Rantz-McDonald has raisedmore than 330,000 eurosto help people who’ve fled Ukraine and the ones who stayed to fight in the war with Russia. After hearing from people directly about what they need, the money is used to purchase and distribute critical items like medicine and sleeping bags, he says.
Ukrainian refugees.LOUISA GOULIAMAKI/AFP via Getty Images
He is not the only one who’s put his life on hold to help. Rantz-McDonald praised volunteers in Poland’s border region and said their kindness was a salve after witnessing the horrors of war.
“It is absolutely exemplary what they’re doing from grassroots levels to local volunteers that are quitting their day jobs just to stay at the border all day and all night to welcome these refugee families that have come in,” he says. “Any kid under the age of 3 is so oblivious in a situation that when they cross the border and there’s a bunch of volunteers that approach them with … lollipops and candy, they’re dancing around, they’re delighted, they’re drinking hot soup and they’re in good spirits.”
Parents and guardians, however, are “absolutely distraught,” he says. “They left with the clothes on their back. They have bags that they’re nearly dragging behind them. The scene really, unfortunately, is not a pretty one. And then some had to evacuate so fast, they hardly have anything with them whatsoever.”
Nigerian medical student Jessica Orakpo, 23, is one of those evacuees.
She has lived in Ternopil, Ukraine, since 2016, she says, but left on Feb. 26 after bombs began to fall. “I had a backpack, and I had a small bag that had water, juice and sweets,” she told PEOPLE over Zoom on Monday. “We didn’t know what to expect.”
Jessica Orakpo
With her friend Nataizya Nanyangwe, of Zambia, Orakpo headed west in a taxi toward Medyka on the Polish border, she says. When they hit traffic — still far from their destination — their driver said he could go no further so they got out and began to walk.
A traffic warden offered the travel companions a ride to a shelter, where they stayed the night, Orakpo says.
The next day, in Mostyska, Ukraine, near the border, buses were shuttling people to their intended destination — but the pair were not allowed to board because, Orakpo says, station workers prioritized white Ukrainians.
“He wouldn’t even look at you if you were Black,” she says,echoing the accountsof other non-Ukrainians and non-white people who have fled. “They were judging based on skin color.”
Courtesy of Jessica Orakpo
Orakpo says a group of more than 20 Africans were left stranded at the station, despite her pleading in Ukrainian to be allowed to board.
“It was so dehumanizing. It was like we lost hope,” she says. “People broke down crying. Some other Africans were shouting ‘Why, why just white people? Why not us as well?’ "
Despite the multiple accounts of discrimination, a spokesman for the Ukrainian Border Guard Service, denied that officials had a policy against people of color trying to leave the country.
“It’s absolutely not true that priority is given to Ukrainians,” he insists. “The only priority we have is for women and children. … That is the only exception.”
But Chris Boian, a spokesman for the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees, says his agency is aware that non-Ukrainian refugees have faced prejudice on their journeys to safety.
“We have received assurances from governments in neighboring countries that these incidents do not reflect official positions,” Boian tells PEOPLE. “There is no place for discrimination at borders against people fleeing Ukraine. All people fleeing are human beings and that’s what the criteria should be.”
Marek Stus, the official with the aid group People in Need, acknowledged “systemic racism across all Easter European countries, and I would say this is not going away quickly despite the crisis situation.” He adds: “It can’t be excluded that it has been seen in some border guards.”
Still, Stus says that in his experience, “I’ve been visiting all the border crossings in Slovakia and Hungary. There are an increasing number of crossings from people from the Middle East, North Africa, Indians, other African countries … and from what I’ve seen they’ve been crossing normally.”
Other threats remain, of course.
Nick Paleologos/Bloomberg via Getty Images
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Perhaps sensitive to news reports about the difficulties non-white people have said they experienced, Dmytro Kuleba, the minister of foreign affairs for Ukraine, shared the number of ahotline set up to assist foreign studentsin Ukraine who want to leave.
“We are working intensively to ensure their safety & speed up their passage,” he wrote in a tweet last week. “Russia must stop its aggression which affects us all.”
Orakpo did manage to escape, eventually: She returned to Ternopil before making a second voyage out of Ukraine, this time to Debrecen, Hungary, a place she’s never been.
With her June graduation uncertain, Orakpo now hopes to find a school that will allow her to finish her studies and earn a degree so she can move to the U.S. to continue a career in medicine.
She’s also willing to go back to Ukraine “if the war should stop,” she says. “I really feel for Ukraine. Really do. It’s been my home. I really want to go back.”
source: people.com
