Poland

WARSAW, Poland (AP) — On her first Shabbat away from the fighting in Ukraine, Rabbi Julia Gris twice led services to welcome the Jewish holy day.

A week earlier, Ukraine’s only woman rabbi had been fleeing the war that scattered her Odesa congregation from Moldova to Romania and Israel. Some stayed behind, braving the Russian shelling.

She first led an online service for those congregants scattered abroad. Then, she officiated one in person for a small group in Poland, taken in by a Christian couple near Warsaw.

WARSAW, Poland (AP) — U.S. Vice President Kamala Harris on Thursday embraced calls for an international war crimes investigation of Russia over its invasion of Ukraine, citing the “atrocities” of bombing civilians, including a maternity hospital.

PRZEMYSL, Poland/ISACCEA, Romania, March 9 (Reuters) - Thousands more Ukrainian refugees fled to central and eastern Europe on Wednesday, many with no contacts and nowhere to go, as host countries scrambled to accommodate them.

Since Russia invaded Ukraine on Feb. 24, the number of refugees has probably reached 2.1-2.2 million, the head of the U.N. Refugee Agency (UNHCR), Filippo Grandi, said.

Most are women and children, as men stay home to fight.

RZESZOW, Poland (AP) — U.S. Secretary of State Antony Blinken is visiting eastern Poland near the border with Ukraine as Russia intensifies its war against the former Soviet republic.

Blinken was in the city of Rzeszow on Saturday for talks with top Polish officials and was to go to a frontier post to meet Ukrainian refugees later in the day.

PRZEMYSL, Poland (AP) — It took Tatyana Pelykh and her 11-year-old son four days of travel and a wait of nearly 48 hours at the border crossing to escape their native Ukraine for Romania. There they found safety and a place to sleep, on the floor of a hotel conference room.

But Pelykh, a baker, says she still carries the terror of war inside her.

“I feel that my body is here, but my heart and my soul are in Okhtyrka and Kharkiv,” the cities in Ukraine where her parents and best friend remain hunkered down in basements and garages under Russian attack.

BARCELONA, Spain (AP) — They file into neighboring countries by the hundreds of thousands — refugees from Ukraine clutching children in one arm, belongings in the other. And they’re being heartily welcomed, by leaders of countries like Poland, Hungary, Bulgaria, Moldova and Romania.

PRZEMYSL, Poland (AP) — Thousands of Ukrainians crossed into neighboring countries to the west in search of safety as Russia pounded their capital and other cities with airstrikes for a second day.

Those arriving were mostly women, children and the elderly after Ukraine’s President Volodymyr Zelenskyy on Thursday banned men of military age from leaving the country.

A woman from the Ukrainian capital, Kyiv, who arrived in Przemsyl, Poland, broke down in tears describing how men were pulled off trains in Ukraine before they got to the border.

WARSAW, February 23. /TASS/: Polish President Andrzej Duda stated that the entry to his country may be blocked for Russians if the situation in eastern Ukraine aggravates.

MEDYKA, Poland (AP) — As tensions soar in Ukraine’s east and Western leaders issue dire warnings that a wider war could be coming, calm persists along Ukraine’s western border with European Union nation Poland.

A sports center painted with the Olympic rings in a small Polish community directly on the border stands ready to house Ukrainian refugees. For now, the center in Medyka is empty. At the nearby border crossing, there is no sign of Ukrainians fleeing.

WARSAW, Feb 14 (Reuters) - An additional eight U.S. F-15 fighter jets landed in Poland on Monday, the Polish defence minister said, amid mounting tensions in eastern Europe after Russia massed troops near its border with Ukraine.

"More American F-15 fighters landed today at the base in Lask," Mariusz Blaszczak wrote on Twitter. "Eight aircraft will join those that came to Poland last week."