The mayor of Warsaw calls on the EU to manage refugees and children alone from Ukraine

Warsaw, 15 Mar The mayor of Warsaw, the liberal Rafal Trzaskowski, warned in an interview with Efe of the arrival of orphaned or unaccompanied children from Ukraine, which he considered “a problem that must be handled at the European level” and noted that Poland has 17,000 children in foster care, but in Ukraine “they are ten times more”. “Most orphans have been left in the care of religious associations. We have noticed the arrival of unaccompanied children in Poland. We see cases. And it is very problematic because in Poland we have 17,000 children in foster care, and in Ukraine, which has almost the same population, the number is ten times greater,” he stressed. Trzaskowski warned that this “must be handled at the European level.” This task is not in the direct hands of the municipality, nor is the general reception of refugees arriving from Ukraine, and it is NGOs and religious communities that are taking care of unaccompanied minors, and the neighbors of Warsaw take many refugees into their own homes. The liberal mayor, a member of the European Committee of the Regions, recalled that more than 1.8 million Ukrainians had crossed the border with Poland yesterday, the country that has received the most refugees since the war began on February 24, so he urged European intervention in managing the situation. Up to 12,000 Ukrainians arrive in Warsaw alone every day. “The situation is gradually overwhelming us” and “we are in need of reception centers” for refugees, he said. “This is not about opening another hotel or transforming another municipal institution into a hotel, we already do that every day, our problem is coordination: most of my staff are right now helping refugees. We can do that for a week or two, but not for months, because the city has to keep running,” he explains. As an example, he points to the appointment of all available psychologists to help refugees, when, before this war, Warsaw already had a “tragic” shortage of mental health professionals, aggravated by the pandemic. Anyway, he warns, this is based “all on too much improvisation and cannot be maintained for a long time”. There are already about 4,000 Ukrainian children in Polish schools in Warsaw, but Trzaskowski warned that minors represent almost half of the 300,000 Ukrainian refugees who arrived in the Polish capital, so “the pressure on schools is also increasing”. In the same way, remember, healthcare was already saturated by COVID-19 and could collapse with new arrivals needing medical attention. “We're not complaining. We have no right to complain about what is happening in Ukraine, and we want to help in every way we can, I'm just saying that this will be more and more complicated because this is just the beginning,” he warned. His concern is what may happen in the coming weeks. “We need a system. We need a European response to the crisis situation. We need a relocation scheme. We need to start dealing with the problem in a systemic way,” he stressed. For the mayor, cities and regional authorities across Europe “help with financial support, sending beds, welcoming people from Warsaw, but this is based on great improvisation and coordination between local governments,” he says, and what is needed is “defining a system” of management. Asked about Poland's unprecedented response to the arrival of Ukrainians, in the face of the refusal to host refugees from the Middle East and North Africa in previous years, Trzaskowski held the Conservative government responsible, although he justified his country's rejection of trapped Syrian, Afghan or Iraqi refugees on the border with Belarus. “(The government) was also building a wall between Poland and Belarus, which is more understandable because it was the Belarusian regime that was trying to create problems on our border, but now, fortunately, even this conservative government has decided to welcome Ukrainians with open arms,” he explained. What is happening in Poland is “unprecedented,” he says, but without civil society, NGOs and volunteers, the system would have “erupted a long time ago, so this (solidarity) is not only because of the actions of the government, but of civil society,” he argues. “Everyone is doing their best, but the question is how long can we go on like this,” he asks.