European refugee crisis 2022 and the war in Ukraine

Martin Staudinger has an analysis of how the Ukrainian refugees could very likely have been a major part of Vladimir Putin's calculations in the Ukraine were: Die vielen Waffen des Wladimir Putin Falter 15.03.22:

It comes in larger look at the "hybrid warfare" he describes the Russians as using in Ukraine. I know "hybrid warfare" is a common term. But I'm always cautious about it. Dropping bombs, firing missiles, armies shooting at each other - those are easy to recognize as war. Blockading a country is an act of war.

But when we starting rolling in economic sanctions, refugee flows, cyber-attacks, and even propaganda operations as parts of "hybrid war," things quickly get a lot less clear. A Foreign Minister putting out press releases with propaganda claims does not give the targeted country the right to send in the troops.

In other words, a term like "hybrid warfare" can serve for threat inflation. Sort of like Hitler comparisons.

But Staudinger's is the first analysis I've seen making the point that generating refugees may have been a key aim of the war. This could explain part of what seems to have been surprisingly slow advancement by Russian forces:

As of yesterday, 2.8 million Ukrainian women and children (the men are not allowed to leave) had fled abroad – and this is probably only the beginning, because so far widespread fighting has been concentrated in the south and east of the country; the western half has so far been largely spared. Against his first enemy, the Ukrainian people, Putin has already won a partial victory.

This brings us to [Putin’s] enemy number two [after Ukraine] : the West. It can be assumed that the Kremlin has drawn the conclusion from the experience since [the much smaller refugee crisis of] 2015 that nothing is better suited to dividing Europe, its states and its societies than a major refugee crisis.

Again, Putin's calculation is not difficult to guess: it is probably only a matter of time before the refugees he uses as a weapon become a noticeable political and financial burden on the EU and its member states; until the first parties (bets on which those could be are gladly accepted; however, the odds are low due to a certain predictability [he’s referring to the far-right parties’ xenophobia]) can no longer resist the temptation to profit from it; until the resulting pressure breaks up the unity of Europe. [my translation, my emphasis]

I don't read this as a fatalistic prediction, but rather one that emphasizes how absolutely critical the approach of the center-right and center-left parties will be in directly countering anti-refugees hysteria, as opposed to a duck-and-cover approach of also promoting themselves as anti-refugee, too, but politer about it than the far right.

Seeing how poorly they have generally performed that task in 2015-16 and since, it would be easy to be fatalistic about the prospects of the center-right parties especially rising to the challenge in an effective way. The temptation to treat the far right parties xenophobia as existing on a left-to-right spectrum which can be divided up by peeling of some of the xenophobes from the far right by adopting their rhetoric and policy positions is very strong.

One early ray of hope in that regard is how quickly the EU invoked a special legal facility authorizing people from Ukraine to stay in the EU for a year without having to apply for asylum. But we aren't quite through the first three weeks of the war yet.

The New Yorker has a “human interest” report on Ukrainian refugees from March 14 that doesn’t give much information at all on the dimensions of the refugee emergency. (Ukrainian Refugees' Journeys Have Just Begun 03/14/2022) It uses an estimate of the refugee number of around two million, which for March 14 is low. The UN refugee agency for March 15 has the number at 3 million, of which around 150 thousand are in Russia and Belarus.

Refugee expert Gerald Knaus has a March 15 article (Wir brauchen eine neue Luftbrücke, sofort Die Zeit 15.03.2022) stressing the urgency of government action by the EU and others, as well. UN relief agencies, charities, and NGOs can do a lot. But how well or poorly this situation develops hangs on how well the EU and the individual national governments organize aid to the refugees. He writes:

Knowing the numbers [of refugees] is one thing. Understanding their importance to us is something else entirely. Many in Europe find it even more difficult to understand what this means: to experience the greatest refugee catastrophe in Europe since the end of the Second World War. And what it means to react to it correctly. Unfortunately, we don't have much time to get used to the new reality. We must now immediately think and act in a way that corresponds to the dimensions of the task. [my translation, my emphasis]

Poland currently has by far the largest number of the Ukrainian refugees. According to Knaus’ article apparently the only country in the EU to commit to accepting a specific number of refugees from those that have arrived is Sweden (population) has agreed to take 200 thousand.

He suggests that Germans and Austrians check out a map of European rail lines to see where most of these refugees are going to be coming without a relatively quickly organized program of distributing them to other EU countries via airlift: “Almost of them will be coming to Berlin and Vienna.”

Some have already been arriving. There are a lot more coming, and quickly, in the coming weeks.