Mapping the Ukrainian Refugee Crisis Using Internet Measurements

Abstract

The conflict in Ukraine, which started in February 2022, triggered a large-scale refugee crisis, with millions of Ukrainian refugees crossing the border to neighboring countries and millions of others forced to move within the country. In this paper we present an insight into how Internet measurements can be used to analyze a refugee crisis. We introduce a novel approach for estimating the number of refugees in each country using website analytics and show that our approach estimates the number of refugees with a Mean Percentage Error (MPE) of 11.8% compared to estimates published by the UN. We believe that these insights can greatly contribute to the ongoing international effort to map the flow of refugees in order to aid and protect them.