Nail 3.5 million people have left Ukraine since Russia launched its invasion on February 24, according to data from the UN High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR), which estimates that in more than ten million who have had to leave their homes in less than four weeks.
How are they distributed? Poland it has already received more than two million refugees, although it is not clear how many have remained on Polish territory. Romania accumulates more than 535,000 arrivals, compared to 365,000 moldovathe 312,000 of Hungary and the 250,000 of Slovakia. The Spanish Minister of Inclusion, Social Security and Migration, José Luis Escrivá, has calculated that in Spain there are “around 25,000” refugees Ukrainians.
Differences between refugee, asylee and displaced person
Now that the concepts are frequently used again because of the Ukrainians who are fleeing their country, it is convenient to differentiate between refugee, asylum seeker and displaced person.
According UNHCRa refugee is “a person who You must leave your place of origin or residence because of the war or who is persecuted for reasons of race, religion, nationality or sexual orientation, among others”. Also, a refugee cross the borders of your country. In the current case, refugees are people who have fled to countries like Poland, Romania or even Spain.
On the other hand, a displaced person is a person “who has been forced to leave everything, but have not yet crossed the borders”, according to UNHCR. Perhaps it is more accurate to call “internally displaced persons” to refer to this group of people and create less confusion.
Finally, asylum seekers are people who, individuallyl, ask for protection from a foreign country. The difference between asylum and refuge is that the former is normally applied to an individualis a more individual process, while the refuge has a humanitarian character and is usually awarded to a group of people, in this case to the Ukrainians. An example of asylum was the famous case of WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange, who lived under political asylum in the Ecuadorian embassy in London.