Almost a year ago, on February 24, 2022, the Russian invasion of Ukraine forced thousands of Ukrainians, mostly women and children, to flee abroad in search of refuge. We saw them arrive at the border in Poland, Hungary and other neighboring countries, by train, by bus and even on foot: exhausted, terrified and sad crowds, who waited for hours and days in long queues at border posts. When crossing, they were received with open arms. As the months passed and the war continued, the flow of arrivals dwindled, but never stopped, and still continues.
According to UN estimates based on statistics from host countries, there are eight million Ukrainians registered in Europe, with Poland as the main recipient (1,563,386 people), followed by Germany (1,055,323). Spain is in fifth place, with 166,832, preceded by the Czech Republic and Italy. The figures are indicative – they vary over time, as people return to Ukraine or move, and not all national statistics are reliable – but historians agree that this is the largest exodus of refugees in Europe since World War II. .
“February 24, 2022 was going to be my first day as an associate professor at the Ukrainian Catholic University of Lviv, but we woke up to the sound of sirens; the war had started and I never taught anymore”, recalls the Ukrainian economist Irina Lapshyna in a conversation in Berlin.
Lapshyna, married to a German and mother of a child, lives in Osnabrück, in western Germany, and in February of last year she had traveled to Lviv with enthusiasm to join the university. “The three of us were there and we decided to return to Germany immediately; my parents took us by car to the Polish border, at the Medyka pass. I haven’t been back to Ukraine since then, but I plan to go back because my university in Lviv is back to face-to-face classes; the electricity fails, but they have a generator,” she explains.
Irina Lapshyna considers herself privileged for being anchored in Germany prior to the war and, apart from helping as a volunteer, she investigates the impact of what happened on the displaced. “I have interviewed many Ukrainians in Germany, especially mothers with children; at first they did not ask for psychological support, even though they were obviously traumatized. The reason is that they were too busy with the bureaucracy to settle in and putting up a strong face so that their children would not be scared; months passed, and it is now when the pending problem arises. Some have traveled to Ukraine to see their husbands or to check how their house is, and that also affects. More Ukrainian-speaking psychologists are needed to treat these people.”
According to the UN, 90% of Ukrainians who fled abroad are women and children. (Men of military age, between the ages of 18 and 60, are prohibited from leaving Ukraine.) The mental health of refugees is already a priority for NGOs, apart from the urgency of assisting them with housing, work or school. They and the children suffer the sense of loss of being uprooted, anguished by the loved ones they have left behind, whether in Russian-occupied areas, fighting as soldiers on the front lines, or in the safer regions of the west. Although many stay in flats and houses because they already have family or friends in the receiving country or have been able to access a flat through social means, many others reside in refugee centers organized by the authorities.
The language of the host country becomes a labor obstacle. In Poland, Germany and other border countries, in a typical migration phenomenon, Ukrainian women with academic degrees now work cleaning at home or in restaurant kitchens. “Many women with higher education worked in Ukraine in the fields of health and school, where language is essential; In addition, it is difficult for them to validate the titles”, says Yuliya Kosyakova, a migration researcher at the University of Bamberg. Kosyakova, Ukrainian by origin, immigrated to Germany with her mother more than twenty years ago thanks to a 1991 law that allowed Jews from countries of the former USSR to enter.
Of the eight million Ukrainians registered in Europe, 4.8 million have taken advantage – because they requested it – of the EU temporary protection mechanism that automatically grants residence and work permits, and access to housing, health care and help social; or to similar mechanisms in non-EU countries. The EU activated it for one year on March 4, 2022, rescuing a 2001 directive for those displaced by the Yugoslav wars. Then he extended it, so it remains in force until March 2024, one more sign of how the world has assumed that the Russian war against Ukraine will be long.
