92: Ukraine (1 of 2): Investigating Migration

This marks the first episode of a two-part series on the war in Ukraine. The first will focus on the work of investigative journalism being done by LightHouse Reports, a nonprofit organization based in The Netherlands. And we’ll be speaking with investigative journalist Halima Salat Barre about the experiences of non-Ukrainian refugees fleeing Ukraine. The second part of this series will focus on the experiences of Jana Kalaaji, a Syrian national who fled the war in her country to study medicine in Ukraine, only to become a double refugee, after the outbreak of the war there.

It is not our intention, nor is it within our means, to provide a full panoramic view of the entire conflict, all of its parties, nor all of their grievances or the events that inform them. But you will hear some perspectives about this war that you are not hearing about much in the coverage of this war from traditional media from either side, and we have done our best to clearly lay out the facts as well as the limits of our knowledge.

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90: Trapped on the Borders: Poland and Greece

In the summer of 2021, after Belarusian leader Alexander Lukashenko enticed migrants and asylum seekers to come to Belarus and use it as a staging area for entering the European Union, the number of people trying to cross into the EU through the Baltic states and through Poland began to increase from the hundreds into the low thousands. And since that time draconian security measures, pushbacks, and the level of desperation of those caught between borders has increased along with the drop in temperature, leaving many freezing, starving, and stuck; pushed back and forth in a heavily forested “no man’s land” on the borders of the EU. 

We speak with Sonia Nandzik-Herman and Douglas Herman, co-founders of ReFocus Media Labs, a Polish NGO that has operated on the Greek island of Lesvos for years. But after spending many months in Poland they’ll also be giving us an update on sitions there and an update on the current situation on Lesvos and on the Greek mainland, where many of the same policies are in place. We’ll also be learning where and how policies and tactics differ.

New York Times article referenced in the introduction.

Photo Credit: @grupagranica and @fundacjaocalenie

Read the report.

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