Good morning. Welcome to Axios today. It's Tuesday, March 15th. I'm Nailibutu.

Today China tries to play both sides in Russia's war on Ukraine. But first, the risk of human

trafficking from the conflict is our one big thing.

Almost 3 million people, largely women and children, have fled Ukraine in the last 19 days.

The vast majority have sought refuge in Poland, which has taken in more than 1.7 million refugees.

As the numbers continue to rise, humanitarian organizations and advocates are warning that the conditions

that Ukrainian borders could put these refugees at a specially high risk for human trafficking.

Daphne Panayatatos works with refugees international.

She's just back in DC from visiting several border crossings inside Poland last week. Hi, Daphne.

Hi. Thanks for having me.

You just got back from the Ukraine, Poland border. What was it like there?

We were there just about a week after the war started, so you can imagine it was a little bit of chaos.

People really moving everywhere, trying to figure out what their next steps would be.

Having just fled real trauma just just days, not hours before.

So a lot of people went to border points ready to offer rides or places to stay for people who were for Ukrainians who were arriving.

So for example, there was a realtor from Germany who was actually at the Shemish border crossing reception point to pick up his in-laws who were coming from Ukraine, who were Ukrainian.

But he came with some extra vans, extra large vans that would be able to accommodate more people so that he could bring them back to Germany where he had actually secured several apartments with funding from the city to pay rent for Ukrainian.

So that they would have a place to stay in Germany if that's where they wanted to go.

And so on the one hand, that grassroots response is amazing, but that also carries with it risks?

Yeah, so that was just one of the countless examples of people who were coming from across Europe and from within Poland, making space within their homes and hotels and hostels to offer accommodation to Ukrainians.

And that's really wonderful, right? But in the rush to mobilize and crowdsource those efforts, there hasn't really been the time or the capacity or even the institutional oversight to create a kind of transparent system with the necessary safeguards that we would need to make sure that people who are in a really vulnerable situation aren't being exploited or put in danger at this time.

And when you say danger, what specifically is refugees, international worried about?

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