More than five months after the beginning of Russia's war of aggression against Ukraine, over 150,000 Ukrainian students are registered in German schools. The news comes as the number of refugees who've fled Ukraine reached the ten million mark this week.
German schools have registered 150,071 refugee children and teenagers from Ukraine as of last week; that's according to the Assembly of Education Ministers of the German states (Kultusministerkonferenz, or KMK) on Tuesday (August 2).
With 27,523 and 21,392 students respectively, the greatest number of Ukrainian students are currently going to schools in the states of Bavaria and North Rhine-Westphalia, according to the KMK. The overall figure has risen constantly since Russia's invasion of Ukraine at the end of February.
Germany currently hosts more than 900,000 Ukrainian refugees, most of them women and children.
Bettina Stark-Watzinger, Germany's federal minister of education, said she expects the number of Ukrainian students to rise further in the new school year, news agency dpa reported. Compulsory schooling hasn't been that strictly enforced yet and some children were still receiving lessons via digital channels from Ukraine, Stark-Watzinger explained.
All 16 German states are currently on their 6-week summer breaks. In most states, the new school year will begin in late August or early September. According to dpa, there are a total of 11 million schoolgirls and schoolboys in Germany.
Also read: German states face housing shortage for refugees
10 million refugees from Ukraine
The number of border crossings from Ukraine, meanwhile, has surpassed ten million for the first time since Russia invaded the country, the UN refugee agency reported on Tuesday, August 2.
A total of 10,350,489 border crossings from Ukraine have been recorded since February 24, according to the agency's tally. Among EU countries, most people have fled to Poland, Slovakia, Romania and Hungary. According to the Polish border guard, a total of more than 5.2 million people have entered Poland as of August 3.
Around four in ten people who fled -- that's over 4.2 million people -- have returned to Ukraine since February 28.
Also read: UN report decries 'double standard' for non-Ukrainian refugees in Poland
With dpa