Five weeks of a brutal Russian invasion of Ukraine. Imagine for a moment what it’s like to live there right now.
Bombs, bloodshed, trauma. No school for your children, no health care for your parents, no safe roof over your head.
Would you try to run away? Ten million of Ukrainians have already done so, according to the United Nations.
Most seek refuge in other areas of Ukraine, which are believed to they are safer. But more than three and a half million people have fled across the border.
They are mainly women and children, since the Ukrainian government forces men under 20 years to stay in the country and fight.
Displaced and disoriented, often not knowing where to go, refugees are forced to trust in strangers.
The chaos of the war may be behind us, but the truth is that they are not entirely safe outside Ukraine either.
“For predators and human traffickers, the war in Ukraine is not a tragedy,” UN Secretary-General António Guterres warned on Twitter. “It is an opportunity, and women and children are the targets.”
Smuggling networks are notoriously active in Ukraine and the countries neighbors in times of peace. And now the fog of war is the perfect cover to increase business.
The risk of children
Karolina Wierzbińska, coordinator of Homo Faber, a human rights organization based in Lublin, Poland, told me that minors were the big concern.
Many were traveling out of Ukraine unaccompanied, he explained. Several children went missing and their current whereabouts are unknown as a result of irregular registration processes in Poland and other border regions, especially at the beginning of the war.
My colleagues and I headed to the Polish-Ukrainian border to see for ourselves.
On a train station, well known for the arrival of refugees, we found a hive of activity. Stunned looking women and crying children everywhere.
Many were being comforted and an army of volunteers wearing phosphorescent vests offered them hot food from steaming industrial-size pots.
Something that seemed very well organized. But not so much.
We met Margherita Husmanov, a Ukrainian refugee from kyiv aged just over 20 years. She arrived at the border two weeks ago, but she decided to stay to help prevent other refugees from falling into the wrong hands.
I asked her if she felt vulnerable. “Yes”, she replied without hesitation. “That’s especially why I care about her safety.”
“The women and children come here from a terrible war. They do not speak Polish or English. They don’t know what is happening and they believe what they are told“, he explains.
“Anyone can appear at this station. The first day I volunteered, I saw three men from Italy. They were looking for beautiful women to sell into the sex trade “, she continues.
” I called the police and it turned out that she was right. It wasn’t paranoia… It’s horrible”.
What is being done?
Margherita Husmanov says that the authorities locals are now a bit more organized. The police regularly patrol the station.
Some people (mainly men) who carried signs with names of conspicuous destinations, so present in the first weeks of arrival of refugees, they have largely disappeared.
But as we learned from various sources, other people with bad intentions are now posing as volunteers.
Elena Moskvitina shared her experience on Facebook. She is now safe in Denmark, so we had a long chat on Skype. What happened to her is chilling
She and her children crossed from Ukraine to neighboring Romania. They were looking for a trip away from the border.
He assures that false volunteers in a refugee center asked him where he was staying.
They showed up later that day and told her that Switzerland was the best place to go and that they would take her there in a van along with other women.
Moskvitina explains that the men looked at her and at her daughter “in a bad way”. Her daughter was petrified
They asked her to show them her son, who was in another room. They looked him up and down, she said. They then insisted that she travel alone, and got angry when she asked to see their IDs.
To keep the men away from her family, Moskvitina promised to meet them when the other women were in his truck. But as soon as they left, she explains, she took her children and ran away.
“They are exposed to fear and exploitation”
Elżbieta Jarmulska, a Polish businesswoman, is the founder of the Women Take The Wheel initiative. Her goal, she says, is to provide Ukrainian refugees with a “bubble of safety”.
“These women have already been through a lot, walking or driving through a war zone and then being exposed to fear and exploitation here. I have no words to describe how that should be”, he says.
So far, it has recruited more than 650 “amazing women” from Poland, as he describes them, who drive back and forth as far as they can to the Polish-Ukrainian border, to offer refugees safe transportation.
I accompany Elżbieta Jarmulska, better known as Ela, to a refugee center where she makes sure to show the officials her ID and proof of residence, before asking if anyone wants to go to Warsaw .
Your car was taken care of quickly. The passengers are refugees, Nadia and her three children.
Ela accommodated the family in her well-appointed car and offered the small children water, chocolate and motion sickness pills in case they needed them.
Meanwhile, Nadia told me about her dangerous journey out of Ukraine from Kharkiv. Back in Poland, she said she was so relieved to have a woman behind the wheel.
I had heard about the risks of road traffic people and exploitation in Ukrainian radio. But she came anyway
she said that her house was being bombed. The risks of war were immediate.
Need
She cares about the best for the refugees, because leaving the border safe does not mean that the danger is over.
Most of the women we talked to hoped to go home as soon as the violence ended. But for the next few days, weeks, even months, they need a place to sleep, eat, send their children to school, as well as a job to support themselves.
These needs make refugees vulnerable.
The leaders of the European Union unanimously approved a measure to open the labor market, schools and access to health care for Ukrainians, but as human rights groups point out, refugees need help registering and learning about their rights.
One of the volunteers I met at the Polish-Ukrainian border said that when you are depressed, without friends and in need of money, you can end up doing things you never imagined.
This woman was lured into prostitution when she she was younger. And that, she says, is in large part why she now helps Ukrainian refugee women.
“I want to protect them. To warn them,” she says. She asked me not to reveal her name. Since then, she changed her life and she doesn’t want her children to know about her past.
Of deceitful good intentions
Five weeks after Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, systems across Europe that screen Ukrainians in need of help are still far from foolproof.
Organized crime (including sex trafficking and organ harvesting and often forced labour) is not the only threat. Refugees are also exploited by individuals.
People in Poland, Germany, UK and elsewhere have opened their homes to refugees, most with the best of intentions. But sadly not all.
We found a social media post from a Ukrainian woman who fled to Düsseldorf in Germany. The man who offered her a room confiscated her identity documents and demanded that he clean her house for free.
her Then she started to sexually harass her too. She refused him and he threw her out.
Irena Dawid-Tomczykkids, executive director of the Warsaw branch of the NGO against human trafficking La Strada, said that the story was too familiar.
Those kinds of things happen, with or without war, he says. But a flood of war-scarred women and children leaving Ukraine means that cases of exploitation and abuse are on the rise.
Adolescent refugees are a particular concern. “We all know teenagers, right? They are insecure. They want acceptance and recognition”, he explains.
“And if they are refugees who are far from home and their friends, they are even easier to exploit”, he continues.
“Girls can love the attention older men give them. Or they’ll be introduced to a nice girl the same age as her who has cool clothes and invites them to parties. That’s how she starts. Do not forget that not only men are pimps, traffickers and abusers”.
Online risk
The factors that drive Ukrainian women to accept apparently generous internet offers to escape their hardships are also multiplied in times of war.
Without revealing identities, Irena recounts case after case in which La Strada Poland is working: Ukrainian girls who offer plane tickets to Mexico, Turkey, United Arab Emirates , without having met the men who invited them.
“My colleagues were trying to persuade a girl to 19 years so she wouldn’t go to a man’s house with her friend,” she says.
“She knows that her friend has been beaten. But the man calls her on her cell phone, tells her nice things and offers her gifts. If they insist on going, we ask the girls to at least register with the local authorities. If they don’t, they have our phone number”, she explains.
“ I hope they can call us if they need us ”.
Governments across Europe have pledged solidarity with Ukraine.
AND human rights groups want them to take better care of those running for their lives. They need protection.
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