While tens of thousands of people are fleeing Ukraine every day, there is a movement in the opposite direction: first, foreign volunteers and Ukrainian migrants fight or provide humanitarian aid, but now women are returning. Driven by the desire to help their loved ones or simply contribute to the protection and survival of their homeland and compatriots, these women who ignore the fear of bombs have become more numerous since the Russian invasion of Ukraine on February 24, reports AP.
According to the agency, many of them are not refugees, but women who have lived and worked abroad.
The AP quotes a woman from Lviv who, while boarding a train in Przemyśl, Poland, said she was a medical worker returning to hospital and “will stay until the end”. Another woman living in Italy said she was returning home to help friends from Kyiv evacuate before the city was occupied by invaders.
The Ukrainian government has ordered the men to stay in the country due to mobilization. That is why most of those who left Ukraine are elderly, women and children.
Poland has accepted more than 1.8 million refugees from Ukraine, almost three-quarters of all people who left the country due to the Russian attack. A spokesman for the Polish border police says that among those who cross checkpoints along the border, there are people who come to it and return, some do it several times.