Europe is doing a good job helping refugees from Ukraine

SHE THOUGHTEU it might have been fireworks. But as Olga Nietsche looked out the window of her flat in Kyiv on the morning of February 24th, a rocket flew by and exploded not ten minutes’ walk away. The 28-year-old checked her phone, brimming with messages not about her work as a translator but about the onset of war. Then days went by when nothing made sense. Friends in Russia—former friends, now—insisted to her that she was lying about there being a war at all. It wasn’t long before she had to go. A mate with a car helped her get to Przemysl in Poland, normally a trip of several hours, now a days-long ordeal. It will take more trains to reach Berlin, where her mother lives. She carries only a few documents, a sleeping-bag and a change of clothes; her voice falters as she wonders what the male relatives she has left behind will face. For her part, all she wants is to sleep. It is a small luxury, but one she has not been afforded in what seems an eternity. Then, she says, she will volunteer to help other Ukrainians, using her language skills to help them get beyond the range of bombs, to reach the safety of European countries that are still at peace.Ms Nietsche is part of what is likely to become the biggest surge of refugees in Europe since the second world war. Over 2m people have fled Ukraine since Russian troops marched in on February 24th. That figure will swell. Estimates, should the bloody campaign continue, vary from 5m to perhaps double that. Previous refugee flows, notably when over a million Syrians and others crossed the Mediterranean to Europe in 2015, ignited political squabbles that showed the at its worst. This time the bloc is displaying its best: a mix of generosity and pragmatism few might have guessed it was capable of.