Ukrainian refugees need mental-health care that their hosts lack

YULIA MALINOVSKA looks from a window in a Warsaw office building where 400 Ukrainian women and children are being put up. As a plane crosses the sky she huddles over her eight-month-old daughter. Her eyes, fixed on the distance, turn to tears. “Every plane scares me now,” she sobs. She is safe, after escaping from a district of Kyiv that was hit by Russian planes, but her mind is still in turmoil. “The moment you accept your own death, something in you changes.”

More than 5m people have fled the Russian invasion, and many have carried with them trauma and loss. That has been compounded by the economic stress of living abroad, and by family separation—Ukrainian men aged 18-60 must stay and help defend their country. The World Health Organisation (WHO) estimated in March that at least half a million refugees were suffering from mental-health issues. That has overwhelmed the already inadequate mental-health infrastructure of their eastern European hosts.