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On Thursday, Filippo Grandi, the UN High Commissioner for Refugees, stated that thousands of people have fled Ukraine since the beginning of the Russian occupation. Most of them are Ukrainian citizens, but there are also foreigners who were there for work or study at the time the Russian army entered Ukraine.
Among them there are many citizens from African countries, but they have a great difficulty leaving the country. Referring to the stories told by some of them, the border guards guarding the borders of Ukraine, especially the one with Poland where many people try to escape, prevent them from leaving, favoring the Europeans instead.
Chineye Mbagwu, a 24-year-old Nigerian doctor who lives in the western Ukrainian city of Ivano-Frankivsk, about 140 kilometers from the Polish border, told the New York Times that she spent more than two days stranded at the border near Medyka. a small Polish town to which most refugees are heading these days.
Mbagwu, stated that the border guards are letting the Ukrainians pass, but are leaving behind the foreigners, in some cases even raping them with sticks, slapping them and pushing them to the end of the lines of people waiting to cross the border. According to her, the Ukrainian guards are mainly rejecting African, Middle Eastern or Indian citizens.
Such evidence has been confirmed by other refugees who do not belong to Ukrainian nationality.
Ahmed Habboubi, a 22-year-old Franco-Tunisian medical student, said all foreign nationals had been told to go to a designated gate at the Medyka border crossing, where only four people passed every two hours.
Instead, Ukrainian citizens were told to go to another crossing point, where they were allowed to cross freely. Habboubi said he had been raped several times by Ukrainian border guards, so much so that when he finally managed to enter Poland, Polish authorities had to take him directly to the hospital.
“It was absolute chaos. We were treated like animals and there are still thousands of people trapped thereHe told the New York Times.
Also, such testimonies have been narrated by various people on social networks, through videos and photos showing the violence of the Ukrainian authorities.
In a video that has been widely circulated on social media in recent days, he showed some police officers at the Lviv station, stopping people of color from boarding the train, to prevent them from going near the Polish border.
Rachel Onyegbule, a Nigerian medical student in Lviv, told CNN that while she was in the town of Shehyni, on the border with Poland, dozens of buses arrived to transport Ukrainian citizens across the border, but she and several other refugees were not allowed to board. .
Saakshi Ijantkar from India, studying medicine in Ukraine, who showed a similar experience to the cases shown above. According to him, the border guards allowed 30 people from India, only when 500 Ukrainians crossed the border. He pointed out that to cross the Polish border they were forced to cross through two checkpoints, which have a distance of about 5 km from each other. Ukrainians, he says, were transported by taxis and buses, while citizens of other nationalities were forced to walk. He also spoke about cases of violence by border guards, as well as long waits. According to him, women were initially allowed to cross, then if men tried to leave, they were beaten for no reason by border guards.
Ukrainian Deputy Interior Minister Anton Herashenko, however, denied the allegations, saying they were simply trying to oust women and children first, then foreign immigrants and Ukrainians.
Andriy Demchenko, spokesman for the service that manages Ukraine’s border controls, also denied allegations of racism and violence against foreign refugees at the border.
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