Nearly two years since the conflict in Ukraine began, the UN says around 6.5 million Ukrainians are registered as refugees globally. An additional 14.6 million are in need of humanitarian assistance.
As the Russian offensive along the entire frontline in Donbas intensified, some local NGOs reported an increase in the number of people seeking to flee Ukraine. For most of them, the first stop is neighboring Poland.
At the Przemyśl border crossing, more and more people enter Poland from Ukraine on foot. Those are mostly women and children but there are also men. Most of them crossed the border with the intention not to come back to Ukraine until the bloodshed is over.
Dariia Vynohradova, 17, from Kharkiv, plays a board game with her boyfriend Dmytro Demchevskyi, 18, from Yuzhnoukrainsk, at Blue Trainers, a community space in a shopping mall in Gdansk, Poland. /Kacper Pempel/Reuters
And those with the least money in their pockets go to the first station on their journey in exile - a refugee center. There are three refugee centers in the Polish city of Przemyśl. The closest to the border is located in a former warehouse, right under a working restaurant.
And between 30 and 40 refugees from Ukraine are there currently. This center is run by the Hope Foundation, providing a first shelter for those who left their lives behind, like Natalia from the Ukrainian region of Sumi.
Her husband and brother died on the frontline and she managed to flee with one child. Now she awaits for her second child to flee Ukraine, so they can try to continue their lives somewhere else.
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"The refugees are coming, and coming, and coming," Natalia told us. "And we are very grateful to Poland for accepting us. What I, myself, read on the Internet and watch videos (seems to) say that it is safe to be in Ukraine. I know that it is not. And on the contrary, the very bad situation there is getting worse."
Here, we also met Marina, who is another refugee. She came from the Lugansk region, together with her 17-year-old son, because she wanted to prevent any harm from happening to him, in the light of recent announcements in Ukraine about a mass mobilization.
"We contacted the 'Rubikus' NGO with a plea to help us leave the country. They met us in the Ukrainian town of Lvov and they brought us here. After, they will take us from Przemysl to Berlin and from Berlin to Freiburg," Marina told us.
Dariia Vynohradova, 17 from Kharkiv, arrives at Blue Trainers, a community space in a shopping mall in Gdansk, Poland. Around 165,000 Ukrainian teenagers between 13 and 18 years of age are registered as refugees in Poland. /Kacper Pempel/Reuters
Other NGOs in Przemyśl confirm that the number of refugees from Ukraine is increasing recently. Ewa Pulkowska from the NGO Dom Ukraiński noted about the cycles of refugees arrival to their center.
She said: "There are two or three days of relative calm. And after those, more refugees arrive. People who simply need our help. Because of what is happening in Ukraine, people simply feel worried that something more serious can happen to those close to them and they simply decide to come."
Anxiety, uncertainty and a sense of desperation are visible on the people's faces here. With the recent news of intensified clashes in the Donbas region and more frequent bombing of targets in the rest of Ukraine, it is very likely that in the days to come, there will be more faces like that in the town of Przemyśl.
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