Romania grapples with hundreds of Ukrainian children arriving alone every week — and fear of a nuclear disaster
Charles Davis/Insider
- Romanian authorities told Insider that the country is facing an influx of Ukrainian children.
- Last week, more than 500 Ukrainian kids entered the country without a parent.
- Dr. Raed Arafat said if Russia's war continues, there could be "very large" humanitarian disaster.
BUCHAREST, Romania — Dr. Raed Arafat, a Palestinian born in Syria, may not have become the head of Romania's Department for Emergency Situations if not for something his parents did 40 years earlier.
Arafat, then living in the West Bank, had applied to a medical school in Philadelphia. "It seems that I had the acceptance of the college," Arafat told Insider from his office at the palatial Ministry of Internal Affairs, "but my parents hid it from me."
Once in the United States, they thought, he'd never want to come back and leave the relative comfort and freedom he enjoyed there. Instead, he went to school in Romania, which in 1981 was governed by a Communist regime. He decided to stay in the country after its government collapsed.
Today the intensive-care physician leads what is effectively the country's version of the US Federal Emergency Management Agency, responsible for preparing for all sorts of disasters. He still never expected to be helping lead the response to war.
"We were ready for floods. We were ready for earthquakes," Arafat said. "None of us thought that we will see people coming from another country, which is a neighboring country, and which are all displaced because of a war in Europe. This was the biggest shock. And this is still a shock."
But the most shocking thing about it is all the orphans and other kids entering Romania without a parent, he said: "Last week, the number was over 500 children, none accompanied."
The war in neighboring Ukraine has forced more than 740,000 people to flee through Romania, a member of NATO and the European Union that lies to the south and east of the country, with the smaller nation of Moldova sandwiched between the two.
Most Ukrainian refugees continue on to other places — typically, those that offer more economic opportunities or have more people fluent in Ukrainian or Russian. Of the nearly 84,000 who have thus far chosen to remain, some over 37,o00 are children under the age of 18, according to the health ministry.
Children who arrive without a parent or guardian are taken into the custody of Romania's Child Protection System. Authorities in Ukraine, home to an estimated 100,000 orphans before Russia's February 24 invasion, are consulted to see if the children have relatives back home or elsewhere abroad; if they do not, it is likely they will stay in Romania.
Their arrival was a shock, but one Romania was prepared for. In 2018, the country carried out a major exercise to test its ability to respond to an indeterminate disaster that required thousands of people to be medically evacuated. The pandemic, two years later, was almost a test run for the crisis it now faces.
Charles Davis/Insider
Nuclear fears spur run on iodine
Dr. Alexandru Rafila, a physician elected to parliament as a member of the center-left Social Democratic Party, took over as health minister in November 2021, a time when bodies of fourth-wave COVID-19 victims were lining the floors of hospitals in Romania. He now worries about the human cost of a Russian military offensive.
"I think one of the worst-case scenarios is to have a lot of wounded civilians," Rafila said in an interview at his office in Bucharest.
"I hope not to be in this situation, but we are prepared — we have 7,000 beds in Romania, especially for this," he said, noting that Ukrainians already enjoy free access to healthcare in the country at least in part due to a Soviet-era treaty between the former members of the Communist bloc.
Romania is also prepared for a nuclear disaster, insofar as any country can be.
Those fears have been exacerbated by fighting over the control of nuclear sites in Ukraine, including the Zaporizhzhia power plant — just a few hundred kilometers from the Romania-Ukraine border — in a region that still remembers the 1986 Chernobyl accident.
"There was a discussion from the beginning regarding the stocks of iodine," Rafila said. He said that talk "in the public space" about a potential radioactive incident next door, and an ensuing rush on the country's pharmacies for iodine pills spurred the government to hold internal discussions about the matter.
Earlier this month, Romania's health ministry announced it was launching an information campaign on the proper use of the pills, which, in the event of a disaster, can help limit the amount of radiation absorbed by the body.
The national government also restocked its emergency supply of the medication and is currently weighing whether or not to distribute them directly to the populace.
"It's on our list of emergency stocks, and stocks should be replaced from time to time," Rafila said of the pills, seeking to downplay the connection to contemporary events.
There are a number of nuclear reactors in and around Romania, and if something were to go wrong with them, spilling radiation into the atmosphere, it might be necessary to ingest iodine.
But it would be less relevant in the event that, say, Russia used a nuclear weapon in Ukraine.
"We don't discuss nuclear war," Rafila said. "You don't need iodine for a nuclear war."
Alex Micsik /Pool Photo via AP
Romania fears influx of war casualties
A more pressing concern is that the conventional war in Ukraine will continue. A renewed Russian military offensive in the eastern and southern parts of the country — and a fight for the Black Sea port city of Odesa — could push many more people to seek refuge in Romania, which has set aside some 3,000 surgical beds for potential war casualties.
Dr. Arafat told Insider the country is also considering setting up a new medical hub near its eastern border with Moldova, where seriously injured or otherwise ill patients could from there be evacuated to other parts of Europe. The idea would be to have other countries, such as Germany and Norway, directly pick up not just the patient but the members of their family.
Arafat stresses that, whether a patient is recovering from cancer or a bomb blast, Russia and its invasion are responsible for them all.
"The war produced these cases," he said. "The fact that now they cannot access care in their own country and they are seeking it somewhere else, this is caused by war. It's not something which just happened."
Whether that new medical hub opens will depend on the course of that war and whether escalated fighting leads to a soaring number of injured refugees. Arafat would prefer that it not.
"We still hope that things will stop," he said, "because if they continue, we believe that the humanitarian disaster will be a very, very large one."
Have a news tip? Email this reporter: cdavis@insider.com
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