In response to John Crace’s sketch (Is Priti Patel vicious or stupid? It’s a fine line for Ukrainian refugees, 10 March), I would like to share my family’s experience of needless and extremely cruel suffering. I am a Ukrainian-born British citizen who would like to bring my family to stay with me in the UK. My family is my elderly mum, who is partially blind, my 11-year-old niece, and my cousin, who lived in Kyiv.
The building where my mum lived was at the epicentre of heavy street fighting and an artillery blast. My cousin saved my mum’s life by pulling her out of the building at the very last moment. My relatives have had an extremely hard and long journey to the Polish border (almost 24 hours on a fully packed train). I met my family in Poland and we went to Warsaw to apply for a visa to the UK, as per guidance issued by the Home Office.
The application requires all documents to be translated into English, which is not easy to do given the fact that you are not in the comfort of your home but in another country. We submitted the application and booked an appointment for biometrics on Monday 7 March. The biometrics have been done and we’re awaiting a decision on our application.
Today is Sunday 13 March, and we still have no news. We do not know how long we will have to wait. No timescale was given due to the large number of applications. In the meantime, we need to stay somewhere and have something to eat. I feel so powerless and upset about the treatment of people who do not deserve this. I feel powerless for my mum, who is traumatised by the fact that she left her home with just one suitcase and left her life and possessions behind, and upset that we cannot even predict when we will be able obtain some kind of certainty. My family has nowhere else to go to. All I can ask is why we are treated in such a way.
Name and address supplied
• My wife’s Ukrainian family escaped from Kyiv, with shelling going on around them, and 24 hours later they were taken in by a Polish family in Warsaw.
On Friday 4 March, the Home Office issued the “family application forms” at 1pm – and by 4pm I had filled in all three forms and submitted them. Following hours in front of a computer screen, I got appointments for 10am on Monday. By 2pm on Monday the interviews and biometrics were all completed.
Since then, it has been with the Home Office’s “decision-making centre”, and as of Sunday afternoon there’s been no progress, according to the online tracker that I’ve been checking frequently. That’s nine days since the process started; four days with the Home Office – and this is a speeded-up service? Priti Patel’s announcement last Thursday that applicants could skip the biometric interview will not speed up anything at the UK end. When they do make a decision, there is then more admin at the Polish end.
The whole approach to this humanitarian nightmare by the UK government, and in particular Priti Patel’s Home Office, has been nothing short of atrocious.
Mike Darkens
Ashtead, Surrey
• Last Tuesday I discovered that playing Jenga in the open air with a wind coming in from the Channel is difficult because the wind keeps blowing the bricks over. My opponent was a young man fleeing war in Sudan, who for many months – along with many hundreds of others – has been sleeping rough and playing a game of cat and mouse with the French authorities as he awaits his dream of getting to the UK. I think he would be somewhat bemused to hear of Ukrainians being offered food and shelter in Calais and the opportunity to apply for a visa for the UK in France. I like to think that his best self would not begrudge the Ukrainians what he so longs for, but, sitting in Calais, it feels very strange and not quite right.
Rt Rev Mark Bryant
Assistant bishop, Diocese of Newcastle
• My parents, Max and Gisela, met one another in the office of the Academic Assistance Council run by Esther Simpson (Unsung heroine who saved refugees from Nazis honoured in Leeds, 8 March). Considering Britain’s lamentable response to the refugees from Ukraine, perhaps now is not the time for modesty. Max arrived in Britain as a graduate student in 1936, became stateless when Germany invaded his native Austria, and was interned in 1940.
He went on to found the Laboratory of Molecular Biology in Cambridge, whose scientists have won numerous Nobel prizes. He received the Nobel himself in 1962, and the Order of Merit from the Queen in 1988. The evidence from successive rounds of refugees arriving in the UK is clear: the Ukrainians will contribute hugely to this country, like the Kurds, the Hungarians and many others before them.
Robin Perutz
York
