Renfe has facilitated procedures and free tickets for the first nine refugees, seven adults and two children, to travel by train to Seville or Portugal
The Government Delegation in the Basque Country and Renfe have established a device in Irun to manage all the movements of Ukrainian citizens fleeing the war and arriving in Spain from France. Renfe offers free tickets for these citizens who are heading to different destinations on the peninsula and also for the departure of citizens to France and, later, to other parts of Europe.
About twenty refugees arrived in Hendaye late on Tuesday afternoon. This morning, in a minibus chartered by the Hendaia City Council, seven adults and two children have arrived at the Adif station. The rest of the displaced have continued their journey by their own means.
This is the first group of displaced Ukrainians to arrive in this way, although the authorities anticipate that it will be a regular dynamic in the coming weeks and estimate that throughout this Wednesday up to a hundred people could arrive in Hendaye with the aim to continue from there on their way to different destinations in the Iberian Peninsula.
In that first group that has arrived at the Adif station, a woman and two children were on their way to Seville, where her mother is, four women were traveling to Porto and the other two adults, another woman and a young man, they were destined for Lisbon.
“I showed up to fight”
The presence of him, Daniel, was striking given the call-up that Ukraine has made to form its militia. “I have lived for a long time in a small town in the Kiev region, but I am Russian by birth,” the young man explained in English. “When the government asked the men to join the defense of the country, I showed up. However, there were a lot of volunteers and they told me that for the moment it was not necessary for me to stay, that I could go. My wife and children left as soon as they could and are in Lisbon with the wife’s sister. I kept waiting to see if they would call me to enlist because I wanted to defend Ukraine. But the days passed and they did not call me and my family was thousands of kilometers away and I no longer knew what to do », he has narrated very affected. “In the end I have decided to leave to be with my wife and my children.”
The Government Delegation in Euskadi, through the Sub-delegation in Gipuzkoa, is coordinating the device to facilitate the transit of all the people who, like Daniel, arrive at the French border on their way to a final destination in Spain or Portugal. With the idea of facilitating the situation on this first day, the sub-delegate himself, Guillermo Echenique, as well as the mayor of Irun, José Antonio Santano, have waited at the Adif station for the arrival of this group, which has been accompanied by the councilor of the Hendaye City Council, Fred Tranche.
The institutional managers have explained that a device has been put in place to manage this situation “which seems to be continuous”. To the staff of Adif and Renfe who have been assigned to this device, the figure of a translator will also be added in view of the fact that the majority of displaced people only speak Ukrainian and “as we detect the needs we will adapt the resources”.
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