KIEV (Middle East Eye) –
Middle East Eye has contacted Egyptian citizens attempting to escape the conflict in Ukraine by crossing the country’s borders into Poland and Romania.
Stories emerged of people feeling abandoned or given misinformation by Egypt’s authorities, of being treated appallingly by border guards that “prioritized white people”, of being left to freeze without shelter and, in some cases, beaten.
Adham Alaaeddin, a 20-year-old Egyptian engineering student studying in Ukraine’s second-largest city, Kharkiv, said they heard the sound of bombardment at four in the morning and decided to leave. He and his friends packed their belongings and drove 1,060km to Lviv in western Ukraine.
‘’The Egyptian embassy in Ukraine told us not to worry and stay at home. I don’t know what my fate would have been had I taken their advice,” he told MEE.
Kharkiv, a city of 1.5 million people near the Russian border, has borne the brunt of attacks since Monday.
Once in Lviv, Alaaeddin said that they walked almost 50kms, as the road to the Polish border was blocked with long queues of cars waiting to cross.
‘’The only option is to walk towards the border, and it took us 11 hours to reach it,’’ he said.
Still, their time at the border was the most challenging part of their journey. As they waited for three days, Alaaeddin and his friends were stuck in a tight space without much room to move.
‘’When we make a fire to warm ourselves, the Ukrainian police force us to put it out,’’ he said.
‘’We were sleeping in freezing weather without any cover, and even after passing the border, we didn’t know what to do and where to go.”
Mahmoud Abu al-Soud, a medical student from Upper Egypt, and his friends from university paid $250 for a private car to drive them to Lviv, from where they walked 40kms to the Korczowa-Krakovets border crossing.
There they stood in line for four days, hopelessly waiting to pass to Poland.
‘’The food sellers didn’t want to sell us any food, and they were prioritizing the white people,” he told MEE.
He said that there was apparent racism from the Ukrainian police in the way they treated them, adding that a female police officer beat and wounded one of his companions.
‘’They also never let us or our female friends keep our right place in the queue,” Abu al-Soud said.
‘’They were moving us back whenever we got closer to the passport checkpoint on the Polish side.”
“My son is married to a Ukrainian, but they’ve only let her pass to the Polish side. My son has not been allowed to cross yet,” said Umm Khaled, whose Egyptian son is in his sixth year of medical school in Ukraine.