Refugees leaving the Ukraine after russian invasion continued to cross its western borders on Saturday, with around 100,000 arriving in Poland in two days. They found temporary refuge in sports halls and train stations.
As Russian forces launched coordinated cruise missile and artillery attacks on several cities, including the capital Kiev, fearful families crowded the borders of the European Union in hopes of entering Poland, Slovakia, Romania and Hungary.
In the Hungarian border town of Beregsurany, 69-year-old Ilona Varga entered the European Union on foot, leaving her home and shop behind. She hopes to be able to return soon.
“My kids are telling me to go to Hungary for good, and they are right,” Varga said. “But it’s so hard to leave it all behind. I was born here, I grew up here, I have my job here, everything ties me here.”
In Poland, which has the region’s largest Ukrainian community of about 1 million people, a further 9,000 refugees have crossed the border since 7 am on Saturday, Deputy Interior Minister Pawel Szefernaker told a news conference.
See images of the Russian invasion of Ukraine:
In Medyka, in southern Poland, about 85 kilometers from Lviv in western Ukraine, thousands of Ukrainians waited for the authorities to process them as refugees.
“I arrived today at 3 am and am waiting for my wife,” Taras, 25, told Reuters on the Polish side of the crossing. “She called me from the Ukrainian side and there is a 30km line of cars and people. She said she doesn’t know when she’s going to cross.”
Czech railways sent special trains that arrived at the Polish border at dawn on Saturday carrying Ukrainians living in the Czech Republic to meet family members who had escaped the war.
In the Slovak border town of Ubla, authorities placed refugees in a local gym where folding beds and air mattresses filled a basketball court. Volunteers handed out sandwiches while children laughed and played with the donated stuffed animals.
“We arrived at the border by taxi and are going to Prague to meet my husband, safely,” Miroslava Krackovska said at the reception center.
A woman gasped and wiped away tears at the news on her cell phone, quickly handing the phone to the woman next to her.
Two buses carrying ethnic Bulgarians from Odessa arrived in Bulgaria on Saturday morning, and a third was on its way. Bulgaria sent another four buses to Kiev to evacuate citizens of its 250,000-strong minority in Ukraine.
A Ukrainian woman married to a Bulgarian described the bombing of her town, and another recounted her struggle to escape.
“For two days we sat in our luggage, hiding in the toilets,” Tanya Mitova, an ethnic Bulgarian, told national channel BNT shortly after arriving in the northeast village of Durankulak, near the Romanian border.
“There were bombings, planes were flying, it was very scary.”
Source: CNN Brasil
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