Russia’s invasion of Ukraine has pushed the number of people uprooted worldwide to more than 100 million for the first time, the United Nations warned on Monday.
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“The number of people forced to flee conflict, violence, human rights abuses and persecution has passed the staggering 100 million mark for the first time, fueled by the war in Ukraine and other deadly conflicts,” the High Commissioner for Refugees wrote in a press release .
“The figure of 100 million is frightening, worrying and sobering. That’s a number that should never have been reached,” said United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees Filippo Grandi.
“This should serve as a wake-up call for us to resolve and prevent destructive conflicts, end persecution and address the causes that force innocent people to flee their homes,” he said cautiously.
The situation was already serious, according to UNHCR statistics. By the end of 2021, the number of uprooted people worldwide had reached 90 million due to new waves of violence or protracted conflicts in countries such as Ethiopia, Burkina Faso, Myanmar, Nigeria, Afghanistan and the Democratic Republic of the Congo.
Then, on February 24, Russian President Vladimir Putin ordered the invasion of neighboring Ukraine, driving millions more into the streets to flee the fighting and reach less exposed regions or another country.
Europe had not seen such a rapid influx of refugees since the end of World War II. Nearly 6.5 million Ukrainians have left the country, mostly women and children, and military-age men are expected to remain in the country. And the UN estimates it could be 8.3 million by the end of the year.
In Ukraine itself, an estimated 8 million people are internally displaced.
Before the Russian invasion, Ukraine had 37 million people living in areas under their government’s control. This number excludes Crimea (south), annexed by Russia in 2014, and the eastern regions controlled by pro-Russian separatists.
These 100 million uprooted people represent more than 1% of the world’s population, and only 13 countries in the world have a population larger than this figure, the UNHCR reminds, in order to better appreciate the magnitude of the phenomenon.
“The international community’s reaction to the people fleeing the war in Ukraine has been extremely positive,” said Filippo Grandi.
“This wave of compassion is very real and a similar mobilization is necessary in view of all other crises in the world,” he underlined.
But the outpouring of generosity and the mobilization of public aid to Ukraine stands in sharp contrast to the much more mixed reception given to refugees from other theaters of war, such as Afghanistan or Syria.
The head of the HCR also reminds that “humanitarian aid is only a palliative, not a cure”. “To reverse the trend, the only answers are peace and stability, so that innocent people are no longer forced to choose between the imminent threat of conflict and the difficult task of fleeing and exile,” he stresses.
On Friday he criticized the twenty countries that continue to close their borders to asylum seekers more than two years after the start of the Covid-19 pandemic in the name of health security. He suspects her of using it as an excuse not to open them again.
A report by two NGOs released on May 19 counted nearly 60 million internally displaced people worldwide last year, many of them as a result of natural disasters.
The situation in the world “has never been so bad,” noted the Secretary General of the Norwegian Refugee Council (NRC), Jan Egeland.
“The world is collapsing,” he stressed.