Ukrainian border

(I’m back-blipping to catch up after a very hectic 10 days.)

This is the tiny border crossing point where people arrive by train from Ukraine and walk through to a small village where there’s just a little cafe and then houses just metres away. Very different from the Siret crossing. Now with the increased arrivals it’s got reception tents and UNICEF ‘blue dot’ centres squeezed in to welcome and support the refugees.

Finally today the misleading refugee numbers were fixed. Official stats had only been counting arrivals into the Schengen area - Poland, Hungary and Slovakia, as refugees passing through have no controls, and therefore no way of counting say if someone arrives over the polish border but then goes on to Germany. In Romania and Moldova which are not Schengen countries they can count departures and were subtracting that number from arrivals so the numbers of refugees looked much smaller. Why does it matter? Well resources given to governments to cope with refugees are determined by these numbers. In one day the figures for Romania jumped from 85k to 450k and it became the second highest receiver of refugees after Poland. Hopefully now it will get more funding and support to cope.