By PTI
BERLIN: The German government said Wednesday that it would seek to ensure refugees fleeing conflicts in Ukraine and elsewhere don’t become victims of crime following a reported rape case that triggered a public outcry.
Authorities in the western city of Duesseldorf confirmed that a young woman who was housed on a hotel boat on the Rhine river was allegedly sexually assaulted by two men earlier this month.
Antonia Massenberg of the Duesseldorf prosecutors office said that both suspects are in detention but declined to confirm German media reports that the victim is an 18-year-old Ukrainian, citing privacy reasons.
Sascha Lawrenz , a spokeswoman for Germany’s Interior Ministry, told reporters in Berlin that authorities are “working to ensure that people who seek shelter here are able to get it.”
Germany has so far registered more than 160,000 refugees arriving from Ukraine in the past month, many of them women, children and elderly people.
Thousands of Ukrainian children who have found shelter in hastily converted housing facilities across central and eastern Europe are struggling to come to terms with their new reality as refugees fleeing Russia’s invasion of their country.
According to figures released by UNICEF on Tuesday, children account for about a half of the more than 3 million Ukrainians who have crossed into Poland, Hungary, Slovakia, Romania and Moldova since the invasion began on Feb.24.
Countries bordering Ukraine have provided sanctuary to a seemingly unending flow of refugees.
But authorities in those countries are facing the monumental task of providing long-term mental care to traumatized Ukrainian children.
Over the past 20 days an average of 55 children have been fleeing Ukraine every minute and the trend is unlikely to change as Russian forces continue their advance.
New arrivals are expected to overwhelm underfunded and poorly managed public schools in tiny Moldova, but also in relatively affluent Poland – the fifth-most populous member state of the European Union – where classes are held in Polish, a language most Ukrainians do not speak.
Psychologists say young Ukrainian refugees appear unable to comprehend the longer-term nature of their absence from home and separation from their fathers, forbidden to leave Ukraine in order to fight the war.
Some of the children insist that they are on a short vacation or a school break, said Irina Purcari, a school psychologist in Chisinau who works with Ukrainian children at the biggest refugee center in Moldova’s capital.
Upon arriving at the centre, “most children are alarmed, reluctant to make contact,” Purcari said.
“But we take the first steps to win them over and lower their anxiety levels.”
Purcari said children speak of their fathers “not in the context of hostilities,” possibly as a way create a sense of calm and feel that their life is in order.
For 34-year-old Ukrainian Tamara Bercuta, her first full night’s sleep after many weeks happened on Monday when she and her children arrived in Chisinau.
She watched her 10-year-old daughter and 4-year-old son draw in a corner of the town’s biggest refugee centre that has been converted into a play area.
Like most other children, her son first reached for crayons in the colors of his country’s flag – blue and yellow.
“It is very bad when there is a war, a (mortar) shell hit a roadblock, many people died,” Bercuta said, recalling the horrors she and her children had witnessed during their flight from Mykolayiv, the strategic maritime Ukrainian city that witnessed fierce battles for days between Ukrainian and Russian forces.
“At home I was afraid because we were constantly (hiding) in corridors and in the basement,” her daughter, Liliya, interjected.
In Poland, which has taken in more than 1.8 million refugees from Ukraine, there are growing concerns about how to integrate those who elected to stay rather to relocate to other countries.
Before Russia’s invasion of their country, around 1.5 million Ukrainians lived in Poland.
Many of new refugees are expected to remain in Poland as well, where they have friends and relatives.
In a six-story business centre in central Warsaw that serves as a home for the most vulnerable refugees, Irina Panasevicz, an Ukraine-born volunteer, said her days consisted of endless calls to area day care facilities and schools to find places for newly arrived children.
“Kids have big problems to adapt in classrooms because classes are conducted in Polish and most children from Ukraine do not speak Polish,” Panasevicz said.
Despite them many obstacles they face, Ukrainian children of differed ages mingled and played in a long hallway outside Panasevicz’s office in the building they now call home.
For them, what was a normal childhood a few weeks ago has been supplanted by the fear of invading Russian soldiers.
“Russia is making war with Ukraine, we want Russia not to take us,” said 7-year-old Bogdan Kolesnik, wiggling nervously on his mother’s lap.
“We want to return home, but we do not know when that will be possible,” said 14-year-old Juna Berzika as she sat with her mother Svitlana and a group of other women recounting the horror of escaping Ukraine and the fear of what male relatives left behind will face.
The prime ministers of Poland, the Czech Republic and Slovenia safely returned to Poland on Wednesday after a visit to Kyiv intended to show support for Ukraine as it defends itself against Russia’s military onslaught.
The leaders met with President Volodymyr Zelenskyy on Tuesday to convey a message of solidarity with Ukraine and of support for the nation’s aspirations to one day join the European Union.
They went ahead with the hours-long train journey despite concerns about risks to their security while traveling through a war zone.
All three countries are members of the European Union and NATO.
Although pronouncing their trip to be an EU mission, officials in Brussels cast it as something the three leaders had undertaken on their own.
NATO’s secretary-general said it was good for allies to engage closely with Zelenskyy, but also didn’t clearly endorse it.
At home, they won widespread praise, hailed as brave for traveling into a war zone when other Western leaders dare not.
There were some, however, who criticized the leaders of NATO states for making a risky trip that was largely symbolic without a clear international mandate.
For his part, Zelenskyy voiced his appreciation for the show of support from members of the EU, which he hopes Ukraine will one day be able to join.
Prime Ministers Mateusz Morawiecki of Poland, Petr Fiala of the Czech Republic and Janez Jansa of Slovenia were joined by Polish Deputy Prime Minister Jaroslaw Kaczynski the chief of the ruling conservative party and the country’s most powerful leader.
The leaders crossed safely by train back into Poland on Wednesday morning.
They then had a phone conversation with European Council President Charles Michel, according to Fiala.
He tweeted a photo of the three prime ministers sitting around a phone as they informed Michel about the “results of the mission in Kyiv.”
In Brussels, European Commission spokesman Eric Mamer didn’t criticize the visit, but said that “solidarity is expressed in different ways through different channels.”
“Our solidarity with Ukraine is absolute. It has been repeated on numerous occasions. But more importantly, it is extremely tangible,” he said, citing the bloc’s financing for refugees and military equipment.
“And I can assure you that this solidarity is very well understood by the Ukrainian authorities.”
At a news briefing late Tuesday in Kyiv, Kaczynski said he believed that a NATO peacekeeping mission is needed in Ukraine.
He suggested that “a NATO peacekeeping mission is needed, possibly some wider international structure, but a mission that will also be able to defend itself and that will operate in Ukraine.”
The remark generated some discussion in Poland on Wednesday, with some commentators saying the prospect could risk drawing NATO into a war with Russia.
Morawiecki’s chief-of-staff, Michal Dworczyk, insisted Wednesday, however, that neither Poland nor anyone else is talking about getting involved in the war.
Dworczyk told Polish Radio 24 that it is “an appeal not only to Europe but to the whole free world, to work out a solution that would realistically have the ability to suppress the Russian aggression.”
Dworczyk said a solution “must be discussed at the North Atlantic alliance level.”
In Slovenia, where Jansa’s right-wing SDS party faces a parliamentary election on April 24 amid decreasing popularity, some saw the trip as a public realtions stunt.
The Ukrainian crisis “comes in handy for Jansa to improve his image in front of his voters and divert attention from domestic political debates,” wrote the independent Vecer newspaper in a commentary on Wednesday.
