With each passing day of the war in Ukraine, the mountains of rubble are growing and people are being killed or injured. Many flee west. Foreign Minister Annalena Baerbock ventures a prognosis for the EU.
Federal Foreign Minister Annalena Baerbock is expecting numerous other war refugees from Ukraine.
“I think we have to be very aware that more than three million people have already fled, but that many, many more millions will flee,” said the Green politician on Monday on the sidelines of EU consultations with colleagues the other EU countries in Brussels. The estimates were now that eight million refugees would have to be taken in.
Just two weeks ago, EU foreign policy chief Josep Borrell said that five million refugees from Ukraine were expected.
To date, more than 6.5 million people have been internally displaced in Ukraine itself. They had to leave their homes, apartments, villages and towns because of the rocket attacks and bombings, the UN Organization for Migration (IOM) reported. In addition, almost 3.5 million people have fled across borders to neighboring countries in the three and a half weeks since the war began, according to the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR). This means that practically a quarter of the former population is affected. Around 44 million people lived in Ukraine before the Russian invasion began. At least 186,000 people from other countries were among the refugees.
No information on Germany
A spokesman for the Federal Ministry of the Interior in Berlin did not want to make a forecast as to how many of the people could arrive in Germany. This depends on the course of the war and also on how much the fighting has shifted to western Ukraine.
In the first days of the war, it was primarily those who had a car or had relatives in other European countries who fled, Baerbock explained on Monday. With the increase in the brutality of the Russian war, more people would come “who have nobody in Europe, who couldn’t take anything with them”.
From Baerbock’s point of view, the developments make it necessary to distribute people across Europe. «We have to distribute from the external border directly to European countries. Everyone has to take in refugees,” she said, and suggested “an airlift in solidarity”. The number per country will have to be “in the hundreds of thousands”. In addition, it should also be distributed across the Atlantic.
Large cities should be relieved
According to a spokesman for the Ministry of the Interior, the major cities in Germany, along with Berlin, Munich, Cologne and Hamburg, are to be relieved. Around 70 buses would also be used on Monday to distribute several thousand refugees within Germany.
North Rhine-Westphalia’s refugee minister, Joachim Stamp (FDP), meanwhile called for a “master plan” to provide one million accommodation places for Ukrainian refugees in Germany. Stamp said on Deutschlandfunk that nobody could say what magnitude one had to be prepared for. From his point of view, however, it would be “negligent to let it go now”. That’s why you need “first of all, a plan that we can generate a million beds as quickly as possible, so that we can actually offer accommodation in the event that this happens”.
The second step is the further distribution. You will have “certain numbers that we will not be able to handle in Germany alone. We need international help for that.” In this context, Stamp named the countries Canada, the USA, Australia, Portugal and Spain.
Discussion about refugee summit
Like Stamp, the parliamentary manager of the Union faction in the Bundestag, Thorsten Frei (CDU), also called for a top-level meeting of the federal, state and local governments to distribute the people fleeing the Russian war of aggression from Ukraine. Government spokesman Steffen Hebestreit did not rule that out, but said when asked: “The federal government has not yet discussed this more closely.”
Meanwhile, the federal government defended its crisis management in dealing with the arrivals. There is a lot of willingness to help, praised Hebestreit. “I think after three weeks things are going pretty well, but we still have to be clear: This is just the beginning.”
In Germany, more than 225,000 war refugees have been arrested by the federal police since the start of the Russian attack on Ukraine. However, the actual number is likely to be significantly higher because there are usually no fixed border controls at the internal EU borders and Ukrainians are also allowed to enter the country without a visa. According to the UN, more than 3.1 million people have fled Ukraine abroad. Around two million people have arrived in Poland alone so far.
Source: Stern
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