You're listening to the London Review of Books podcast. I'm Thomas Jones. My guest today is Azadeh Moaveni, who works at the International Crisis Group.

Her most recent book is

Guest House for Young Widows about women who joined Islamic State. She has a piece in the current

issue of the LRB on the crisis at the Poland-Ukraine border. Hello, Azadei, and thank you very

much for talking to me. Thank you for having me. As you say at the beginning of your piece,

the Russian invasion of Ukraine has led to the largest and swiftest

mass movement of women since the Second World War, that more than four million have fled the country

and as many are internally displaced. But whether it is safer out of the country is far from clear.

And Ukrainian refugee women and children are vulnerable to many kinds of exploitation, as you make

clear in the peace.

And the UN calls it a protection crisis of vast proportions.

So what is or what are the biggest risks facing them?

The biggest immediate risk, and this is something that volunteers noticed immediately when

they began showing up at the border to help bring

refugees into the cities of Poland is kidnapping and trafficking.

Journalists that I spoke to who were at the border the very first days mentioned that they

immediately began to see men on their own,

sort of suspicious-looking men in that they weren't with families or that they, you know,

look like they were lurking. So the possibility that, and this is a small sort of minority,

of course, because the volunteer response was absolutely crucial

to being able to manage this vast flow.

You know, on some days, 140,000,

...