The war in Ukraine permeates the mist of this rainy morning in Barcelona. It is 9:20 a.m. and unrest floats around at number 185 Numància Street, where around twenty people are waiting for the Ukrainian consulate to open.
The new military recruitment law, approved by Kyiv on April 11, has fallen like a blow on the nearly 300,000 Ukrainians residing in Spain, two thirds of them displaced by the war.
In a desperate attempt to add soldiers, Ukraine is tightening the screws on men of combat age, inside and outside the country. For those who live abroad, consular services will stop if they do not return to comply with military requirements. For practical purposes, it means that their passport will not be renewed nor will they be able to process any document.
“Like North Korea,” Alex muses. 31 years old, he is from Kharkiv, one of the cities most martyred by Russian missiles, although he is quick to emphasize that he marched seven years ago, “when there was no war and it was not even known that there would be war.” In Spain, things are going reasonably well for him: he is dedicated to electronic music and organizing events, and among his projects is setting up an S.L.
Dreams that are in the air. The ticking is marked by your passport, which expires at the end of the year. He has gone to the consulate to try to renew it before the law comes into force on May 23, but they do not process applications until that date. And then, he says with a scathing smile, he already knows what they will tell him: he will have to return to Ukraine and appear at a recruitment office if he wants a new passport.
“They take away my freedom,” he despairs. Father of two children, born in Spain, he is clear that he will not go to war. “I don’t understand why I have to die for Ukraine. It hasn’t given me anything. Everything I have has been given to me by Spain. I don’t have anyone there anymore, my family is away, we sold the house a long time ago. And besides, how can someone like me be useful on the front? “I have never held a gun in my life, they will kill me for sure.”
Alex stresses that his opinion on the Russian invasion has not changed, and that he helps by sending money. “Putin is a son of a bitch. But this war started for freedom. This is supposed to be about Ukraine’s right to enter the EU, NATO. All these years talking about this, to end up doing like Russia, taking away the freedom of citizens. Is that why so many people are dying?
Long demanded by the Ukrainian army, the law was also a requirement of NATO. Its secretary general, Jens Stoltenberg, avoided openly applauding its approval, but said: “I trust that Ukraine will make the necessary decisions to mobilize the necessary number of men, and we will do our part when it comes to material.”
Ukraine has lowered the mandatory age to serve in the army from 27 to 25, a measure that President Volodymyr Zelensky, with declining popularity, has taken ten months to sign. His government is under strong pressure, with protests from soldiers’ families because the new law does not include the return of soldiers who have been fighting for two years without rotation.
In this context, those who have fled and been able to escape are an easy target: “Staying abroad does not exempt a citizen from his duties to the Homeland. That is why yesterday I ordered measures to restore a fair attitude towards all men of draft age in Ukraine and abroad,” announced Foreign Minister Dmitro Kuleba.
More than 4.2 million Ukrainians live in the EU under temporary protection, according to Eurostat data as of February 2024. Of these, some 860,000 are adult men, despite the fact that one of the first martial measures was to prohibit men in military age left the country. If in the first months of the invasion only 7.7% of those arriving in the EU were men, today it is 33.5%.
The exhaustion of an endless war also hits the host countries. The doors are no longer open to refugees.
Poland has been the one that has raised the tone the most. Defense Minister Wladyslaw Kosiniak-Kamysz has said his country is “ready” to help Ukraine bring its nationals residing in Poland back to support the war effort. “Many Poles are shocked when they see Ukrainian men in hotels and cafes, and hear how much effort we have to make to help Ukraine,” he launched.
Polish businessmen do not see it the same way. In August 2023, the employers’ association warned that Poland was “losing the race for Ukrainians” and that the labor market “urgently needs immigrants”, given the data that some refugees were leaving for other, more hospitable countries.
With almost one million, Poland is one of the countries with the most Ukrainian refugees, surpassed only by Germany’s 1.2. In relative terms of population, those who bear the most weight are Czechs, Lithuanians, Poles, Estonians and Latvians, in that order.
Kosiniak-Kamysz’s words have raised the hackles of Ukrainians across Europe. Will they detain and deport those who are left without papers? Will more countries follow Poland?
Asked about its plans regarding the Ukrainians, the Spanish Ministry of the Interior emphasizes that any legal change will be decided “within the framework of the council of interior ministers” of the EU. The Foreign Minister, for his part, declines to comment.
All these questions loom this rainy morning at the consulate. “There is great insecurity,” Sergiy shakes his head – “Sergi”, he insists in impeccable Catalan –, a Ukrainian who has lived in Lleida for more than twenty years and is married to a Catalan woman. He has Spanish nationality and the law does not affect him, but he is worried about his family.
“When my brother-in-law’s passport expires, what? He came out legally, he is sick and can’t fight. He could return to Ukraine, go to a recruiting office and resubmit the medical file. But you never know who you will meet, in the offices they have to meet a certain number of recruits and they are desperate,” explains Sergi.
The brother-in-law’s passport is not the only dark cloud on the horizon. The Spanish Government has just extended until March 2025 the temporary protection that all Ukrainians can benefit from, even those who arrived before the war. It is the third and last possible extension. “And then? Nobody says what will happen next,” Sergi laments.
The uncertainty also distresses Viacheslav, 45, who smokes while his wife renews their youngest son’s passport in Barcelona. They live in Tabuenca, an Aragonese town of 300 inhabitants, with their four children. Being the father of a large family, he explains in English, exempts him from going to war, but the laws change.
They have been living off savings for two years. In Tabuenca there is only work in the fields, something they have never done. Language is another barrier. He is an engineer and had a machinery import company, but with the war everything stopped. “In the last year some factories have reopened and I have been able to work a little again, remotely. But it is little money.”
“I am worried because I am in the middle, neither in Spain, nor in Ukraine. I feel like a gypsy. I don’t know if we will return, but I only think about the boys. If they don’t renew our passport, we will lose our TIE [the foreigner’s identity card], we won’t even be able to go to the hospital.”
They have already had problems at the bank, because the expiration date on the card is March 2024, and they have had to take the printed page of the BOE announcing the extension to the office.
“I give you my Ukrainian passport,” Anatoli, a plumber who has Spanish nationality, says in a telephone conversation. He believes that the new law is a farce “to look good with Europe and the United States,” which will only harm the poorest. “In Ukraine, if you have money, you don’t go to war. Everything works with corruption. By paying, you leave the country. By paying, they make you a medical report. And whoever pays, will have the passport,” he assures.
R. today lives in a refugee apartment in Bilbao managed by the Red Cross, along with two compatriots who do not speak Spanish and a Colombian. He is from Zaporizhzhia, another hit city. He left for Poland with the whole family at the beginning of the war, they returned to Ukraine and then returned to Spain alone. “I was 16 years old, I didn’t want to go to war, and when I turned 18 they wouldn’t have let me go.” His father and an uncle of his are at the front, and he barely hears from them every two or three months. He is always wondering if there will be another call. “I have few plans: look for a job and wait for the war to end one day,” he says by phone. He breathes: he has a passport until 2033.
Paying is the only way that Oksana, 43, has found for her son, 24, to avoid war. She has been working for years in Barcelona cleaning tourist houses and apartments. Much of her salary goes to receipts from an academy in Ukraine where her son is supposed to be enrolled, as students are exempt from the service. Also to bribe the teachers every time there is an exam, so that they say that you have taken it and passed. “I’m not proud, but I don’t want my son to die,” she admits. In her town there have already been several boys who have returned in a box.
Now that the mandatory age to serve has been lowered to 25, she is wondering whether she should try to get her son out of the country. “It costs about 10,000 euros, I don’t have it but I could get it. But it scares me. In the end it depends on who you meet at the border. And if they catch you, you go straight to the front.”
But there is another Ukraine. Alexánder, 50 years old, works on the Camp Nou construction site. His passport expires in 2027 and he hopes the war will be over by then. If not, he is clear about what he will do: “I will apply for a Russian passport and go to Russia.” He is from Donbass and pro-Russian. “What they tell you about the war is a lie,” he maintains. “Russia had been warning for ten years that Ukraine could not continue killing and stepping on Donbass.”
“I know that if I set foot in Ukraine, they will catch me, give me a gun and take me to the front. But who am I going to fight against? Against Donbass? It is impossible”.
