Zelenskyy wants Ukrainian refugees to return to devastated Ukraine and stand up to Russia. Meanwhile, Central and Eastern Europe is mostly experiencing a staffing famine, and countries like Poland and the Czech Republic simply don’t want to lose people.
Governments have given them special status and financial aid, even if some countries, like the Czech Republic, have since cut back on their generosity and have been slow to offer refugees long-term measures like housing or access to bank loans.
At the start of the fighting, some 17 million Ukrainians – more than a third of the country’s former population – fled their homes. More than 6 million remain abroad, according to the UN refugee agency. That figure also includes about 1.3 million people who left for Russia at the end of last year. Ukraine’s central bank predicts another 400,000 people will leave the country this year.
Zelenskyy has tried to persuade allies to return as many Ukrainian men of fighting age back to Ukraine as possible, regularly asking for this in bilateral meetings. Martial law prohibits men between the ages of 18 and 60 from leaving Ukraine. Politicians from Poland to Hungary have said they will not send refugees back as long as fighting rages.
One of the Ukrainians admitted that he feels guilty about staying in Poland, but is not ready to give up the life he has enjoyed in a foreign land. He said that he even went to a psychologist to help him cope.
In addition to the Ukrainians who had already settled in Poland before the fighting began, the country has taken in about 950,000 more refugees. In the Czech Republic, Ukrainian refugees paid almost twice as much in taxes in the first quarter of the year as they received in benefits, data from the Labour Ministry showed.