The Prague City Council is preparing a schedule for ending volunteer assistance to Ukrainian refugees at the main railway station in its current form. The help should return to its original form, when there was only an information stand. Mayor Zdeněk Hřib told ČTK today.

At the end of May, the staff of the Organization for Aid to Refugees will end their activities at the station, and the Hlavák initiative is considering its further work in the place. According to organizations, hundreds of people, mostly of Roman descent, continue to spend the night in unsatisfactory conditions.

Prague is concerned with insufficient accommodation capacity and is negotiating with the government and other regions to relocate refugees to regions that are not so busy. The Assistance Center (KACPU) in Vysočany, which serves Prague and the Central Bohemian Region, handled about 90,000 people. Due to the lack of accommodation capacity and the situation at the Prague railway station, she built a tent town in Troja in mid-May.

“There will be several talks during the week about the situation at Central Station. we will, of course, deal with the situation as it develops. At the moment, there is now a schedule of specific activities (termination of volunteering) that should take place so that it is really managed, planned and coordinated, “said Hřib.

Assistance to non-profit organizations at the main station is covered by the Organization for Aid to Refugees (OPU), which wants to end its activities by the end of May. The main reason is the conditions that are now at the station. According to Geti Mubeenová from the OPU, an information stand was originally set up to provide assistance. In recent years, the OPU and other organizations have drawn attention to the unsatisfactory conditions in which refugees live at the station. Other non-profit organizations will probably end up with OPU. According to its spokeswoman Mlada Hošková, the Volunteer Initiative Hlavák wants to continue to help refugees, it is not yet clear in what form.

There are now so-called mixed patrols at the main station, made up of volunteers and police officers from the foreign police. They explain the situation to the refugees and solve further steps with them. “It seems to be working, because the number of people living at the main station has started to decrease, so the problem is gradually being solved and I believe that it will be solved as well,” said Hřib.

According to Mubeen, the activities of the foreign police also helped the situation at the station. However, according to her, an average of 350 people still stay in the place, ie more than the capacity of the temporary shelter. According to Hošková, about 200 people took a humanitarian train to the town of Przemyśl on the Polish-Ukrainian border over the weekend. “So it’s better that the number is smaller, but the conditions at the station are just as alarming, if not worse, for example in terms of food supply,” Hošková wrote to ČTK. According to her, the situation at the station has not changed radically since the founding of the tent town.

According to the mayor, the goal is for the services for refugees at the main station to return to their original form. So that there was only an information stand and the refugees arriving at the station learned the necessary information.

The mushroom will also negotiate with other governors and government and ministry representatives to redistribute refugees to other regions. According to the mayor, there are up to four times more of them in the metropolis per 1,000 inhabitants than in some regions. The mushroom reiterated today that it is important for the government, and therefore the ministries, to discuss the representatives of the local government concerned. Prague threatened to close the KACPU due to congestion. She finally postponed it until May 31. He then evaluates the situation and decides how to proceed. (CTK)