The Home Office was accused on Sunday of asking newly arrived Ukrainian refugees how long they plan to stay in the UK as the government came under mounting criticism for its response to the victims of the humanitarian crisis.
The home secretary Priti Patel was, on Friday, again forced to change visa rules for Ukrainians with relatives in the UK. More family members will now be included – though many remain excluded – and length of stay is extended from one to up to three years. But critics said the policy fell significantly short of the UK’s international obligations and that it was ungenerous in comparison to the EU, which has pledged to welcome refugees with “open arms”.
Continuing confusion over the Home Office’s latest response to the deepening humanitarian crisis yesterday prompted the UN to intervene, setting out a number of ways that the UK government should act to help those fleeing Ukraine.
UNHCR, the UN’s refugee agency, urged the UK to immediately extend the visas of all Ukrainians living lawfully in the UK, a move that would protect tens of thousands at a stroke.
Following analysis by the UNHCR’s legal protection team in London, spokesperson Christine Pirovolakis told the Observer that the UK should also allow all Ukrainians living in the UK lawfully to sponsor family members.
The prime minister, Boris Johnson, has promised a “humanitarian sponsor scheme” for Ukrainians with no UK ties, but details are yet to be announced.
With almost 1.4 million people having already fled Ukraine, and projections that 4 million could leave if the conflict escalates, the UNHCR said that Johnson’s scheme may need to be rapidly “scaled up” to cope with the size of the crisis.
In the meantime disquieting details over how the Home Office is welcoming some new Ukrainian arrivals are starting to emerge.
Rustam Isayev, 45, received a call from the Home Office asking him how long his cousin and her two children planned to stay after he helped them make the fraught week-long journey from Kyiv to Luton via Kraków.
“I don’t think this is the correct question to ask when people are running away [from war],” said the British construction company director from Essex. His cousin, Tarana Veliieva, 38, arrived in the UK with her children, aged 13 and 17, on Wednesday on a visitor visa, which is valid until the end of March.
But the Home Office, Isayev said, “didn’t know what to do” with her, passing him from person to person on the phone: “Someone was saying: ‘How long is she going to stay here?’ I nearly went mad. I said: ‘What do you mean ‘how long is she going to stay here’? That’s a bit of an unfair question to ask right now, isn’t it?’”
He said they did not appear to have been told how to respond to Ukrainians appropriately and that the British government should do more to help refugees.
“If we are the ones who can give them a safe place and if we are the ones who can give them food and look after them while the fight is going on there, then why would the British government not let us do it?”
Immigration experts continue to lament the UK’s restrictive visa policy. Immigration solicitor Vanessa Ganguin said she has been approached by Ukrainians who were completely baffled by the Home Office rules: “According to the current wording, an aunt can join a niece in Britain but not the other way round. Their British relative has to be an immediate family member of an extended family member, but an extended family member of an immediate member doesn’t count. Confused?”
Ganguin said she had been talking to a former Home Office official who admitted even they weren’t sure how to interpret the rules.
Enver Solomon, chief executive of the Refugee Council, said: “There needs to be greater flexibility so anyone who wants to come to the UK has a safe route to do so – and that would mean extending the visa routes.”
Other cases uncovered by the Observer include that of Ivanna Shemeta, 41, a knowledge management specialist from Cambridgeshire who is married to a British national, with whom she has a five-year-old daughter, but who is still unable to bring her elderly parents, who live in Kyiv, to the UK.
Shemeta said it will be two-and-a-half years before she has settled status and is able to sponsor her parents to come to Britain. “I don’t have the right to bring them in because I haven’t lived in the UK enough. But what is enough?
“I’m living here as a resident. I’m here – I have the domicile intention to live here because this is my new home, my daughter is going to school here and I’m intending to be here all the time … This is so unfair.”
Maria Tymofienko spent the last week guiding her 69-year-old mother on a treacherous solo 500-mile car journey across Ukraine from Kyiv to the Romanian border remotely from her home in Horsham, West Sussex.
The lawyer’s mother, Oksana, finally landed in the UK from Bucharest on Wednesday on a visitor visa, and her family greeted her with a Ukrainian flag. Tymofienko also wants to bring her aunt and cousins over from Ukraine but she is unsure whether she will be able to under the current rules.
“Other countries – like Ireland, Portugal, EU countries – are opening their doors without any kind of ‘buts’. But the UK has different approach. It’s not straightforward.”
A government spokesperson said: “We have been working at pace to launch the Ukraine family scheme – one of the first of its kind to become operational anywhere in the world. It is now open for extended family members to apply.
“As well as immediate family members, British nationals and people of any nationality settled in the UK will be supported to bring parents, grandparents, grandchildren, adult children and siblings to the UK.”
