MANILA, Philippines — Some Filipinos have fled the Ukrainian capital of Kyiv amid the looming threat of a Russian invasion of the former Soviet state, feared by Western intelligence officials to happen on Wednesday.
Shirley Santosildes, head of United Filipino Global in Ukraine, told ANC’s “Rundown” on Tuesday that some Filipinos have headed nearly 500 kilometers west of Kyiv to the city of Lviv, where a number of foreign governments, including the US, have relocated their embassies in light of the conflict.
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“Lviv is the safest place that we can go to. So far, some Filipinos are already there,” Santosildes said in Filipino.
Santosildes, however, remains in Kyiv as the school that she teaches at assures her that a Russian invasion would not happen, despite the continued massing of Moscow’s troops at its border with Ukraine.
‘All political propaganda’
“We’re still working offline, face-to-face. Our school still has no order for us to leave. They tell us not to worry, that nothing like that will happen and that it’s all just political propaganda,” she said.
She added that the Filipino community in Ukraine is regularly meeting with the Philippine Embassy in Poland, which is offering free flights back to Manila. Around eight Filipinos have so far availed of the free flight back home, Santosildes said.
Unlike the UK, the US, Canada, South Korea and Japan which have all called on their nationals to leave Ukraine as tensions continue to rise, the Philippines has yet to issue a similar advisory to some 380 Filipinos living in the eastern European country.
The Philippines’ Department of Foreign Affairs said Saturday that most of the Filipinos living in Ukraine are in Kyiv, which is “far from the eastern border near Russia.”
Filipinos are “encouraged to contact the embassy, report any untoward incident they might observe in their respective areas, and continue monitoring their Filipino friends through social media.”
Why is there conflict?
Ukraine had long been a part of the Russian empire for centuries before becoming a Soviet state and then becoming independent following the fall of the USSR in 1991. It has since moved to forge closer ties with the West.
The current conflict is a continuation of Russia’s annexation of Ukraine’s Crimean peninsula and its backing of a separatist rebellion in the eastern part of Ukraine in 2014, in response to the removal of Viktor Yanukovych as Ukrainian president due to his rejection of an association agreement with the European Union in favor of closer ties with Moscow.
Ukraine, under the administration of comedian-turned-president Volodymyr Zelensky, has asked the West for help and has wanted to join the North Atlantic Treaty Organization, a military alliance of 30 states.
These moves have miffed Russia under the leadership of Vladimir Putin, who has ordered troops and military equipment to gather near its border with Ukraine.
Russia appeared to open the door Monday to a diplomatic resolution of the deepening Ukraine standoff, as the United States said it believed Putin had yet to make a final decision on invading the eastern European country.
While Russia said it was ending some military drills, signaling a possible easing of the crisis, in Washington the alert level remained high — with a top official calling the threat of invasion "more real than ever before." — with Anna Smolchenko and Dmitry Zaks/AFP