The drama that you are living Ukrainewith the invasion of its soil by the Russian Army, the loss of lives in combat and the risk of losing its status as an independent and democratic state, whether Putin intends to annex it or turn it into a satellite, it may have a second chapter in the form of a refugee crisis. The UN humanitarian office predicts that the conflict could cause, depending on the course of the war, the displacement of between one and five million refugees (up to three million of them with Poland as their destination). So far, about 100,000 of them have already crossed the borders of neighboring countries (Poland, Hungary, Slovakia, Romania and Moldova). According to Unicef, the various UN humanitarian agencies are preparing contingency plans for a situation whose impact would be comparable to that of the greatest crises experienced in recent years. The UN has demanded that the war situation not prevent the distribution of humanitarian aid, which already reached the Donbas conflict zone before the Russian invasion and will be even more necessary with the destruction of infrastructure and housing. And to neighboring countries, some of which have not distinguished themselves by their willingness to welcome asylum seekers, he asks them not to close their borders and show their solidarity.
The member countries of the NATO they must assume, not part of the blame for the conflict, which undoubtedly falls on Vladimir Putin’s expansionist warmongering and indifferent to international legality, but of the responsibility for decisions made so far and even more from the burden of coming to the aid of civilian victims of the outbreak of hostilities. The desire to draw Ukraine into the Western security sphere but without bringing it under the cover of the NATO structure has left the country defenseless, with its president issuing bitter reproaches from a besieged capital for being alone and defenseless against attack. A situation that many other nations have (we) experienced amidst the indifference of the international community.
In the most recent crises of refugees who have fled conflicts in the African continent, Syria or Afghanistan (on the border of Belarus, on the Greek islands, in the waters of the Mediterranean and the Canary Islands) the border countries have had to take care of the newcomers in the front line, when the EU has not preferred, as in the case of Turkey , outsource the costs of your hosting. The willingness to redistribute the contingents of asylum seekers among all the Union’s partners has been, with honorable exceptions, scarce, when they have not come up against the open rejection of some of the countries that now find themselves with the new problem at their doors (and that, although it is a sad consolation, they now seem more willing to receive citizens of another European country than when it comes to people of other origins).
The West can promise military aid to forces trying to resist the Russian war machine, but it will surely come too late. Given the course of events, it is to be feared that the aid that is necessary will be humanitarian, basically in the form of resources for the refugee reception. Europe and the United States have failed to prevent the invasion in the field of diplomacy. The least they can do is not to fail the citizens of Ukraine in dealing with the consequences of this failure, to welcome them in this hour of need and to do so in a shared way.