PORTLAND, Maine — Rep. Chellie Pingree, D-Maine, returned to the Pine Tree State late last week after a weeklong fact-finding trip that took her to Poland, Moldova, Austria, and Romania.
Along with six other members of the House of Representatives, two Democrats and four Republicans, she got a firsthand look at the largest displacement of people in Europe since World War II.
The numbers are hard to comprehend. More than 3.5 million Ukrainians have fled the country. Roughly 10 million, which is nearly a quarter of the country’s population, have left their homes since the Russian invasion just over a month ago.
And a particularly unsettling number is that more than half of Ukraine’s children, according to the New York Times, have been driven out of their own homes.
Seeing the humanitarian crisis that has unfolded is, of course, different from reading about it. Families across Ukraine have been torn apart since all men ages 18 to 60 are required to stay to defend their country.
“When you sit down and talk to a mom with her kids — and the grandmother is with her but the grandfather stayed home, or she just left her husband who’s joined the military — it’s just hard not to cry,” Pingree said. “That’s just all there is to it. None of us can imagine a situation like that.”
Moldova, which has a tenuous democracy and ranks among the poorest of the European countries, according the World Bank, has already taken in 100,000 Ukrainian refugees. Pingree applauded Moldova’s humanitarian response but worries about the strains the influx of refugees will put on that small nation.
“These are countries that don’t have a lot of excess resources,” she said. “Energy prices are going to rise. The economies are struggling. It forces the United States to think a lot about where our aid goes, [and] how do we help to support these countries?”
Watch the full conversation to hear about what Pingree saw and did on her visit to Eastern Europe.