380,000 Ukrainian refugees arrive in Germany

The United Nations says it is now expecting an additional 3 million refugees to pour out of Ukraine this year in an attempt to flee the ongoing Russian invasion.

The UN refugee agency (UNHCR) has updated its projections and now estimates that a total of 8.3 million people will flee Ukraine this year, a UNHCR spokesperson in Geneva said on Tuesday.

At present, nearly 5.3 million refugees are believed to have left Ukraine for one of its neighbours, she said. She described the speed with which the Ukraine refugee crisis was unfolding as unprecedented in recent times.

More than 380,000 Ukrainian refugees have now arrived in Germany, according to a tweet by the Ministry of the Interior in Berlin on Tuesday.

However, the exact number of refugees from Ukraine in Germany is not known, due to the absence of passport controls at the EU's internal borders.

The Czech Interior Ministry announced on Tuesday that more than 310,000 Ukrainian war refugees had been issued with Czech residence permits since the beginning of the Russian invasion of Ukraine in late February.

Globally, only Syria has been the source of more refugees than Ukraine, the spokesperson said, stressing that that was during the course of a far longer period of time.

The UNHCR said that it required an additional $1.85 billion in funding by the end of the year to support Ukrainian refugees in Hungary, Moldova, Poland, Romania, Slovakia, Bulgaria, the Czech Republic and Belarus.

Within Ukraine, 7.7 million people are believed to have been displaced by the fighting, according to UN estimates. Another 13 million people are believed to be stranded in various regions and unable to escape due to the security situation, the UNHCR spokesperson said.

Before the Russian invasion, Ukraine had a population of about 44 million.

The situation within Ukraine is deteriorating further, according to a UN Office of Emergency Assistance (OCHA) spokesperson. As a result, OCHA has doubled its donation target for the year to $2.25 billion. It has so far received $980 million, it said.

The money is to be used to provide people in Ukraine with housing, health care and clean water for the next six months. The emergency relief office estimates that some 15.7 million people in Ukraine currently require humanitarian assistance.