Attachments
Introduction
This report provides an overview of the protection needs and risks refugees from Ukraine coming to Poland after February 24, 2022 are facing. The data analyzed in this report were collected during the Protection Monitoring (PM) conducted by the IRC in April, May, and June 2023. During this period, the Protection Monitoring Team of the IRC in Poland interviewed a total of 274 adult displaced people in Warsaw and Katowice region. Where justified, the comparisons to the first cycle of the Protection Monitoring (February-March 2023) are provided.
The IRC realizes many differences in the result are due to the sampling (please refer to the Methodology section of this report), therefore comparisons should be made cautiously.
It has been over a year since, on February 24, 2022, the war in Ukraine, which started in 2014, escalated. Those displaced were mostly women, children, and the elderly, as men of conscription age were largely prohibited from leaving the country(1). People who remain in Ukraine face significant challenges in daily life, with some 17.6 million persons in the eastern part of the country in need of humanitarian assistance (2). When writing this report, 966,630 refugees from Ukraine were registered in Poland(3).
The past few months have been marked by serious humanitarian concerns. On June 6, an explosion caused significant damage to the hydroelectric Kakhovka Dam on the Dnipro River, located in Kherson oblast in Ukraine (4). The flooding that resulted from the destruction of the dam severely affected around 17,000 people in government controlled part of Kherson oblast and potentially affected more than 42,000 people in the region.(5) Further, at least 28 towns and villages have been in the emergency stage.(6)
In addition to other military activities around Ukraine, this event led to an expectation that the numbers of refugees to Poland would increase. However, this has yet to happen, and the number remains steady. Month to month, the number of people coming to Poland from Ukraine is higher than the number of people leaving for Ukraine by about 50 thousand since February 2023. (7).
The Protection Monitoring Team of the International Rescue Committee (IRC) started operating a year after the war escalation in Ukraine. This is the IRC's second Protection Monitoring report. It provides an overview of the protection needs and risks faced by those who came from Ukraine to Poland after February 23, 2022. The data was collected between (and including) April and June 2023. During this period, the protection monitoring team of IRC in Poland interviewed 274 adult displaced people: 195 in Warsaw, 14 in Rusiec near Warsaw, and 65 in Katowice.