Thousands more people fleeing fierce fighting in Ukraine streamed into central and eastern Europe on Tuesday amid renewed efforts to create safe evacuation routes from cities being bombarded by Russian forces.
Two million people – mostly women and children – have now fled Ukraine since the beginning of the Russian invasion on Feb. 24, the U.N. refugee agency UNHCR said.
With fighting around many of Ukraine’s main cities intensifying under Russian missile and artillery attacks, authorities across eastern Europe are struggling to accommodate the swelling wave of refugees.
“As far as the accommodation is concerned, there are indeed times when it gets very crowded,” said Witold Wolczyk, from the mayor’s office of Przemysl, a town near Poland’s busiest border crossing that has become a transit hub for Ukrainian refugees.
“Last night we managed to get 30 buses out of Przemysl, they went in different directions … We are trying to do our best to make this traffic flow smoothly,” he said.
At the Medyka border crossing, east of Przemysl, where refugees have been arriving by foot and by car, the line of waiting vehicles stretched about 6 kilometres (3.7 miles) with waiting times on the Ukrainian side of the border running at 20 hours, two women told Reuters after they made it across.
