On February 24, 2022, Ukrainians woke up from a long night punctuated by bombardments: Russian troops had invaded the country. The exodus is taking place: some accompany their families out of the country before returning to fight, others rush to the borders, by car or in crowded trains. They first have to go through a neighboring country.
In the first days of the war, hundreds of thousands of Ukrainians turned west to Poland, Hungary, Slovakia, Romania or Moldavia. On March 6 alone, the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR) recorded a peak of 140,843 crossings at the Ukrainian-Polish border. At the end of March, more than 2 million people passed through Poland. The migration crisis is reaching an unprecedented scale. According to UNHCR, as of February 15, 2023, almost a year after the start of the war, 8,072,198 Ukrainian refugees have been registered in Europe, i.e. 18% of the population of their country.
The majority of departures took place in March 2022, with more than 3 million border crossings. Since then, there have been between 1 and 1.5 million visits each month. But it is not always to flee the country: Ukrainians can thus return to their city to visit relatives, before returning to a border country.
According to a survey conducted by the UNHCR among 17,750 Ukrainian exiles, 15% wanted to return once to their country to see relatives. According to this same study, the vast majority of civilians who have fled the war are women over 35 with one or more children. The general mobilization, decreed on February 24 in Ukraine, prohibiting men aged 18 to 60 from leaving the country, these are very few.
Ukrainians fleeing to Russia
To the north, east and southeast, Ukraine is bordered by Belarus and Russia. In the first weeks of the conflict, Russian troops advanced rapidly and thousands of Ukrainians found themselves trapped behind the front lines and tried to flee wherever they could, including Russia, which was often the most accessible solution. At the end of March, the HCR counted more than 280,000 crossings at the Russian border. But, quickly, the Ukrainian government accuses Russia of deporting its citizens, “including in the so-called self-proclaimed republics of Donetsk and Luhansk, since populations that could have been present there since 2014 have also been forcibly displaced”explains Thomas Chopard, a historian specializing in Ukraine.
A protection status in the EU
Quickly, Europe organizes itself to welcome populations fleeing the war. On March 3, 2022, European Union (EU) ministers use a 2001 directive for the first time “on minimum standards for granting temporary protection in the event of a mass influx of displaced persons”. Ukrainian nationals have the right to temporary protection status in all EU countries, with broad access conditions: one year after the war, 4.8 million applications have been registered.
Poland and Germany are the countries that have granted the most refugee statuses, followed by the Czech Republic. But in proportion to the size of the country, the Czechs took the largest share: Ukrainian refugees make up more than 4% of the total population. Estonia comes second (2.9%), followed by Poland. France, it comes far behind, with just over 65,000 refugees for 68 million inhabitants.
Temporary accommodation in certain Eastern countries
The Ukrainians spread over the different countries of Europe, initially in the east of the country, then towards central and western Europe. This shift towards the west is explained initially by “the precariousness of the reception conditions in the border countries, which very temporarily received the refugee populations, registered them, but never with a view to receiving them in the medium term. This is particularly the case for Moldova, a small country with very limited reception arrangements,” explains Thomas Chopard. Afterwards, “there have sometimes been policies that are relatively hostile to a longer stay for Ukrainian refugee populations. Notably in Hungary, which certainly welcomed the Ukrainian populations massively and registered them, but on the very explicit condition that they continue their migration to the west immediately”.
Over time and Ukrainian counter-offensives, some civilians have returned to their home towns. In kyiv, the inhabitants gradually returned from the end of spring, when the Russian forces were moving away.
The important role of diasporas
Poland is an exception among the neighboring countries, since a non-negligible proportion of Ukrainians in exile have settled there for the medium or long term. The country has issued over 1.5 million temporary protection statuses. The Ukrainian diaspora, estimated at more than a million people before the war, played an important role in the settlement of new refugees.
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In the westernmost countries, the diaspora has also been important. As of May, more than 100,000 Ukrainians received temporary protection in Spain, and as many in Italy in July. In these two countries, the Ukrainians already there put pressure on the local authorities to set up reception centers. Governments have also mobilized in an unprecedented way to welcome Ukrainian exiles. Germany is the second country which issued the most temporary protection statuses behind Poland and ahead of the Czech Republic, according to the latest Eurostat data. For Thomas Chopard, previous experiences in France explain the few Ukrainians who came to take refuge there: “This weak reception today is probably one of the longer-term consequences of the policies of rejection, of lack of reception, which played out in particular at the time of the vast Syrian exodus of 2015.