(NewsNation Now) — With more than 4 million refugees expected to flee Ukraine, a Romanian woman has already opened her home.
Cleopatra Coman has welcomed a mother and daughter who escaped the violence. She said they are happy they’re safe but worried about family they were forced to leave behind.
The Ukrainian government is not allowing men ages 18-60 to leave the country. Coman said the mother she took in had to leave her brother and parents behind.
Coman was inspired was to start taking in refugees almost as soon as the war began. Her grandparents are Ukrainian but that wasn’t her primary reason.
“I’m a little bit Ukrainian. Even if I wouldn’t be, it doesn’t matter. What matters is to be human right now … in this time,” she said.
Coman said she doesn’t have much and lives in a rented apartment and doesn’t have a spare bedroom. She said the Romanian government is even turning event halls into shelters for Ukrainian refugees.
“The help is really massive. I’ve never seen this in my life,” she said.
The United Nations said that “while the scale and scope of displacement is not yet clear, we do expect that more than 10 million people may flee their homes if violence continues, including 4 million people who may cross borders to neighboring countries,” spokesman Stephane Dujarric said Thursday.
Syria, whose civil war erupted in 2011, remains the country with the largest refugee outflows — nearly 5.7 million people, according to UNHCR’s figures. But even at the swiftest rate of flight out of that country, in early 2013, it took at least three months for 1 million refugees to flee.