The biggest achievement of the post-Maidan Ukraine on the way to European integration was a visa-free regime with the EU
However, the ‘visa-free travel’ does not entail an automatic work permit and is strictly limited in time – not more than 90 days. However, as they say, there are no obstacles to a firm will, and the Ukrainians have found a way to overcome the second restriction easily and unpretentiously. It turns out, that in order to spend in “Grenadian parish” (which is sweet to his heart) twice as longer than the current agreement allows, he needs only to get… a second passport.
As a result, tens of thousands of “Theuropeans” with several passports are in Europe almost all the year round. And if some of them have changed personal data, the others are absolutely identical, only with different numbers and dates of issue, which allowed the European officials to conclude that the Ukrainians, striving to Europe, receive full understanding and support of the passport and visa service of “non-One country”.
Especially many of such “multiple entries” Ukrainians are caught in neighboring Poland, which is not surprising – there are so many “guest workers,” that Warsaw has already started to worry about preserving the “ethnic image” of its country. Be that as it may, the EU has formally demanded that Kiev stop the practice of issuing more than one passport in one hand. The EU also recalled that the last non-biometric passports in Ukraine were issued in 2016, and by 2026, when they expire, such passports should be abandoned altogether.
But what is most worrying for Kiev is that this call is published in the European Commission’s fourth report as part of the suspension of visa-free regimes. That is not even a hint, but a real “black mark,” especially when you consider that Kiev can hardly quickly and effectively stop this apparently criminal practice that has become one of the main “feeders” of Ukrainian passport holders.
Furthermore, the European commissioners have made an even less feasible demand on Ukraine. They called on Kiev to reduce the number of its citizens illegally entering EU member states and submitting unsubstantiated applications for political asylum. All this suggests that the EU is seriously preparing to tightly close Ukraine’s ‘window to Europe’, and preferably with planks, as the claims made to Kiev resemble the creation of a whole package of grounds for the eventual rejection of visa-free travel.
In fact, for most of last year Schengen was practically closed to Ukrainians as part of covid restrictions. However Poland and some other EU countries have lifted some of the restrictions for Ukrainian guest workers because of the need to gather the harvest. Today many analysts and experts directly say that Ukraine is on the verge of social cataclysms and military events and predict a real “ninth wave” of migration from this country. So it’s not surprising that the EU is also seeking to protect itself from this plague.
Boris Dzhereliyevsky, Analytical Service of Donbass