By Nicolas Niarchos and Nikolai von Bismarck The Nation

Przemyśl, Poland—It is 10 hours by train from here to Gdánsk, six hours to Warsaw, four hours to Kraków. “Some of these people don’t even know where Gdánsk is,” Yulia volunteered, smoking outside the station here as streams of refugees wheeled their belongings up and down past her. Yulia is 30, an artist, Ukrainian by origin, and now living in Poland. “Warsaw is full. Kraków is full,” she said. Two hundred thousand Ukrainian refugees are now estimated to be in the capital, more than a tenth of Warsaw’s current population.

Yulia had come here from Warsaw a few days before as part of the great wave of support that had come to meet the people fleeing Putin’s war in Ukraine. “I host five people in my home. Mostly they are girls my age. Mostly they go to Poland and Spain,” she said. Some were going to Italy. “Europeans still don’t really understand it, this war. I hear from lots of Italian leftist friends of mine that this is the denationalization of Ukraine. I’m like, fuck you!”

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