WARSAW – Warsaw’s largest children’s hospital has placed patients from Ukraine on a waiting list for a liver transplant, sometimes ahead of Polish children. Schools in the Polish capital have had to look for more teachers to keep up with the influx of new students. Public transport is at risk of buckling under the strain of too many new residents.
However, to everyone’s surprise, Warsaw continued to work, despite predictions of breakdowns and public backlash. The city, which has welcomed hundreds of thousands of fleeing refugees, has decorated itself with Ukrainian flags and banners in support of Poland’s war-torn eastern neighbor.
But just as the refugee tsunami, which increased the capital’s population by nearly 20% in just a few weeks, seems to be in decline, the mayor of Warsaw, Rafal Trzaskowski, is now bracing for a possible new wave. happens when the Russian military pushes to achieve what the President. Last week, Vladimir V. Putin vowed to “completely complete” his war in Ukraine.
“Warsaw is operating at full capacity,” said Mr. Trzaskowski, a liberal opponent of Poland’s conservative ruling party, Law and Justice. “We took over 300,000 people but we couldn’t take more. With Russia’s escalation in eastern Ukraine, we could have a second wave.”
For several days, it looked like the invasion of Poland was over as Russia’s retreat from the Ukrainian capital, Kyiv, encouraged some Ukrainians to venture home and others to stay. For the first time since Russia invaded Ukraine, on February 24, Poland’s border service in April announced that the number of people arriving from Ukraine outnumbered those passing through other routes.
However, that trend is unlikely to hold up, however, and if reversed dramatically with a large influx of new refugees, could push an already stressed city beyond its limits. .
“Imagine your city suddenly growing by 15 to 20%: this would be an incredible amount of pressure and how much it would cost on normal city services like public transport , sanitation, education, etc,” said the mayor. “These costs run into the hundreds of millions of dollars.”
At Warsaw’s central station on Friday, a major hub of Ukrainians going both directions, 54-year-old Natalia Glinskaya said she left Ukraine in March, moved to Sweden via Poland and back again. Warsaw this week with plans to catch the train back home. .
But after learning that Russian shells had fallen early Friday in her hometown east of Dnipro, she shelved that plan. Although a Russian speaker, like most Ukrainians in the east of the country, she cursed Mr. Putin, who vowed to protect Russian-speaking people from persecution, calling him “” crazy terrorist” capable of doing anything.
“I’m going back and forth to see what to do now,” she said, predicting that Russia’s offensive in the east will deter many Ukrainians from returning home and encourage others to leave, especially after Orthodox Easter Sunday, an important family holiday.
“Then there will be a second wave,” she said.
Figures released by Polish border authorities last week showed that the number of Ukrainians leaving and arriving was almost equal on some days. However, as Orthodox Easter approaches, more people return to their families in Ukraine than arrive, with the Polish border service reporting on Saturday that 19,900 people have crossed into Poland since Ukraine on the previous day, while 23,800 people went in the other direction.
After a peak of more than 30,000 Ukrainians arriving in Warsaw every day last month, the number dropped to just a few hundred last week. This number is now increasing again, with two or three thousand refugees arriving in the capital every day, mainly from the eastern Donbas region.
Many Ukrainians who have fled to Poland since the Russian invasion are amazed at how well they have been received.
Roksolana Tyymochko-Voloshyn, 34, who arrived last month with her seven-year-old son with cancer, Volodymyr, said: “It’s great to have a neighbor as kind as this as the eastern neighbours. Ours attacked us with such cruelty.
Driving from the border straight to Warsaw by ambulance, they were taken to the Children’s Memorial Health Institute, a vast medical complex southeast of the capital, to treat their son’s eye tumor. Miss. He had already spent the halfway point of 25 rounds of radiation treatment in Kyiv as they fled Ukraine. His mother, who left her husband to fight, was at his hospital bed day and night.
Marek Migdal, director of the children’s hospital, said that patients from Ukraine “enjoy the exact same treatment as Polish citizens,” and he was initially worried that “if their numbers increase, so will their capacity. I won’t be enough.”
However, the number of Ukrainians hospitalized has stabilized as other hospitals in Poland and abroad receive Ukrainian children in dire need of medical care.
Very few Ukrainian children are admitted to the Warsaw Children’s Hospital in need of treatment for their war wounds. But the war, because of medical supplies and the diversion of doctors, put their lives in jeopardy. “If we cannot help these children, we will be responsible for their deaths,” said Piotr Socha, a Polish doctor at the medical institute responsible for a liver disease ward. “Ukraine cannot help them. We have to help.”
The mayor of Warsaw said that extraordinary welcome rug laid out by millions of ordinary Poles in the early weeks of the war could also spark conflict, should another wave of traumatized people hit the city. his and the national government, which has so far left most of the heavy damage elevated to private and individual charities, has no clear plan.
“The numbers have dropped significantly, but now they are going up a little bit,” said mayor Trzaskowski. An outbreak of war in eastern Ukraine, he added, could prompt a new exodus to Poland by people who previously decided to stay but “witnessed atrocities in Bucha, Irpin and other places and now on the move” is the Russian force bearing the villages and cities to the east.
“We couldn’t improvise any more,” he said, recalling that without a clear national strategy, he had to phone fellow mayors and beg them to send buses to Warsaw to help ease the stress on the capital.
The mayor said most help for Ukrainian refugees comes from local governments, private citizens, and “exactly the same organizations that have been deprived of funds by the central government for many years because they fight for refugees, for women’s rights, the LGBT community and all minorities. “
“These are the NGO groups that saved us,” he said.
In total, Poland has attracted nearly three million Ukrainians, winning the country’s widespread acclaim abroad and helping the central government erase its reputation as callous and hostile to foreigners. Just a few months ago, Polish border guards and soldiers used batons and water cannons to prevent asylum seekers, many from the Middle East, from sneaking across the border from Belarus.
Mr. Trzaskowski, a longtime enemy of the conservative nationalist government, will visit the United States next week to seek help in unloading his city.
“It would be great if the image of Poland improved more and more,” he said. However, referring to the governing Law and Justice party, he added that “it should not be forgotten that these guys are still violating the rule of law and attacking independent institutions.”
The city government has provided temporary housing to more than 70,000 Ukrainians in unused office blocks and gyms, but Mr Trzaskowski said more and more refugees are finding shelter with their families. and friends or with “complete strangers who, in a month or two, might say, ‘I can’t extend this offer much longer.”
People with sick children often stay in the hospital. Alina Babyna, who has traveled to Poland to treat her 11-year-old son, Yevgenii, has a rare liver disease, sleeps by her son’s bed and has no plans to stay in Poland indefinitely, says she just left Ukraine after being doctors. at a hospital in Kyiv where her son is receiving treatment left over to treat wounded soldiers near the front lines.
“I will definitely go home when we win the war,” she said. “Fate will decide. But I believe in God. I hope and know that he will help.”
