"American citizens should leave, they should leave now. We are dealing with one of the greatest armies in the world."
The United States was the first to sound the alarm, Thursday, February 10, with this disturbing statement by Joe Biden in an interview with the NBC channel.
“Things could quickly get out of hand,” the American president repeated that day, adding that he would not send soldiers on the ground in Ukraine, even to evacuate Americans in the event of a Russian invasion. , because it could start "a world war".
Since then, many countries have followed in the footsteps of the Americans.
Among those who have called on their nationals to leave Ukraine in recent days include, among others, Germany, Italy, Spain, Canada, Norway, Australia, Japan, Israel, Saudi Arabia or the United Arab Emirates.
In the air, the airline KLM announced on Saturday February 12 that it would suspend flights to Ukraine until further notice.
For its part, Kiev has promised to keep its airspace open despite a threat of Russian invasion.
But according to the national press, planes flying in Ukrainian airspace would no longer be protected by international insurance companies from February 14, leading to cancellations.
"These chain reactions are impressive, it's starting to be too much," laments France 24 Tetyana Ogarkova, head of the international department of the NGO Ukraine Crisis Media Center, joined in Kiev.
"Such hasty and massive departures in a few days prove that there is a certain urgency, that the threat is very real and that adds to the anxiety-provoking atmosphere," she laments.
🇨🇵 Find the letter from the ambassador of 🇨🇵 in 🇺🇦, @EdePoncins, to the #French community in #Ukraine here!
⬇️https://t.co/TvUegdCuck@francediplo @FR_Consulaire
– France in Ukraine 🇨🇵🇪🇺 (@FranceenUkraine) February 13, 2022
Paris, which rather wants to believe in a diplomatic solution, is an exception.
The French authorities are one of the only European forces not to have asked their nationals - nearly a thousand live in Ukraine - to leave the country.
The Quai d'Orsay simply advised "to postpone all trips to Ukraine" and the French Embassy called on its nationals on the spot to "stock up on water, food, warm clothes" and gasoline.
Withdrawal of OSCE observers
To the evacuation advice were added the relocations of several Western embassies from Kiev to Lviv, a city located in western Ukraine.
The United States, followed by Canada and Australia, have transferred most of their employees there to maintain a small consular presence.
The institutions of the European Union have, for their part, recommended that their non-essential staff of the representation in Kyiv should leave to telework from abroad.
And Romania, which did not urge its citizens to leave, preferred to withdraw non-essential staff from its embassy in Kiev, while Israel decided "to evacuate the families of diplomats and staff from its embassy".
“The worst, explains Tetyana Ogarkova, was the announcement of the withdrawal of most of the observers from the observation mission of the OSCE [the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe], present in the gray zone [ which separates the Ukrainian positions and the separatists in the Donbass]. They had been present since the beginning of the conflict and represented an important source of information on what was happening in the combat zone," she said.
Added to this is also the departure of some of the Canadian trainers and 160 American soldiers who were training the Ukrainian forces.
Some 200 Canadians had been deployed since 2015 in Ukraine as part of this mission.
A decision justified by the fact that an armed confrontation between Russian soldiers and soldiers belonging to a NATO member country would ignite the powder and risk degenerating into a world conflict.
Departures in favor of psychological warfare
On the ground, Ukraine is surrounded on its northern, eastern and southern borders.
Russia has more than 130,000 soldiers spread across the border, while conducting large-scale military maneuvers in neighboring Belarus and the Black Sea.
"We don't know which side the Russian army could attack from and the population is tense, it's a bit like waiting for a terrorist attack", explains Tetyana Ogarkova, for whom these chain departures contribute to fueling psychological warfare. which is currently being played in Ukraine.
"The position of the Americans when they started to alert of the presence, in November, of Russian troops on the border was consistent, but these chain reactions for a few days are starting to cause panic and this can also have negative consequences".
Many Ukrainians consider the position of US President Joe Biden too alarmist, including the Ukrainian authorities.
President Volodymyr Zelensky has also called the move of several foreign embassies to the West a "big mistake".
A few days earlier, he had made it known that he did not appreciate repeated warnings from the United States that a Russian attack was imminent.
"Right now, our enemies' best friend is panic in our country. And all this information [about a possible attack] only causes panic and does not help us," he said.
No mass exodus of foreigners
"A lot of Ukrainians feel neglected," says Tetyana Ogarkova, while putting things into perspective.
"This mainly affects the inhabitants of Kiev, who see their neighbors leaving, which is not necessarily the case in the villages".
And to recall that if the personnel of the diplomatic missions leave the country, "millions of Ukrainians, them, remain".
01:19
At the border with Poland, many Poles left Ukraine by car, according to information gathered from border guards by France 24 correspondent Gulliver Gragg.
However, given the many tickets available at Kiev airport, "there is not a massive exodus [of foreigners]", according to the journalist, who consulted several sources.
With AFP
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