'If a million more come, we won’t be able to cope,' Polish mayor says of influx of refugees
While Poland has been welcoming refugees fleeing the destruction in Ukraine, the country will eventually meet its limit on how many people it can take in, Konrad Fijolek, president of Rzeszow, Poland, a city about 60 miles from the Ukrainian border, told ABC News.
Like many cities that border Ukraine, Rzeszow, a town of about 180,000 people, has become a pathway to safety and a lifeline for millions of refugees flooding across the border from Ukraine.
Poland will be able to receive about 1.5 million people, but any more will put the country under strain, Fijolek said.
"If a million or more come, we won't be able to cope," he said.
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Some estimates suggest as many as 4 million people could leave Ukraine due to the conflict, but most of the major cities in the country are already full — and officials are attempting to move refugees into smaller cities, a feat that is "not easy," Fijolek said.
So far, all the shelters set up in Poland are temporary, he added.
"We would like to avoid the view of refugee camps here," he said. "We would like people who are escaping from the war to think that what awaits here is proper camp not camps."
In addition, the mental state among the people in Poland is continuing to deteriorate, Fijolek said.
"We as local leaders would like to send the message that if there's any possible action to stop the war [find it] and then try to negotiate, because every day at the border we can see the human tragedy," he said.
-ABC News' Chris Donato and Marcus Moore