Ukrainian war and Ukrainian refugees

Julia Ioffe, a Russian-Jewish immigrant to the US who reports on Russian affairs, gave this interview to PBS for a Frontline Special on the Russian war against Ukraine, Putin's Road to War: Julia Ioffe (interview) Frontline PBS 03/10/2022.

Near the end (43:45), she says of Vladimir Putin:

I think he's more dangerous than he's ever been at any point in the last 22 years. I think he did not expect to lose in Ukraine. And therefore he will not lose. He will grind the country down to a fine, fine ash. And it doesn't matter how many Russian soldiers die in the process, how many Ukrainian soldiers and civilians die in the process, he will not be humiliated by people he calls "little Russians".

The honest answer, eight million more on top of the two million or so already there.

But virtually no European politicians wants to say that directly because it's a very touchy political theme, which will quickly become much more controversial. To be realistic, the EU countries will argue and negotiate among themselves over which countries accept how many Ukrainian refugees. So even the most pro-refugee office-holders and leading politicians have to take the negotiating positions of their country into account.

Ioffe gives an idea of the size of the current refugee challenge (46:45):

What that means for Europe, you know, if you just - even if you set that tragedy aside of that, you know, blooming tragedy aside, again: a million people in a week fled - to some of the most xenophobic countries in Europe, who right now are greeting them with open arms because, (a) they're their neighbors, and (b) they're white and Christian and look like them. But how long does that last? How many more refugees can the West absorb? We say with the refugee flows from Syria, they gave us Brexit, they gave us the rise and empowerment of the far right in Germany, and in Hungary, in the Czech Republic and France. Is this going to keep emboldening the far right?

Answer: There's no point in even formulating it as a question.

I'm sure Putin is very, very aware that managing an immigration crisis is a huge weakness for the EU. Because he and everybody else saw what Ioffe refers to there. If there were any lingering doubt, the Polish and EU reactions to the few *thousand* refugees Belarus sent across the border into Poland last year confirmed it about as clearly as it could. I haven't seen any specific reporting on this aspect, but it's obvious now that there's a very good chance this was something that Putin encouraged just to see the EU's reaction.

The nominal reason for it was to retaliate for sanctions the EU had placed on Belarus for a blatant act of air piracy by the Belarusian government. But it seemed like an odd kind of response.

Here is a news report from four months ago, Warnings that Belarus migrant crisis risks military conflict BBC News 11/13/2021:

I'm hopeful about how the EU will respond to the refugees. Hopeful but very skeptical. The far right is already trying out their xenophobic spin on this, portraying this as part of the George Soros COVID Virus "Great Replacement" conspiracy theory. Although several European far-right parties have been tiptoeing around invasion of Ukraine, they are generally Putinist parties. They have a long-standing ethnonationalist vocabulary to morph "white" Ukrainians into "subhuman Slavs." (It's not consistent with their current admiration for Russia, but they don't care.)

The common media image of Ukrainian refugees as mostly white women and children is accurate. But there are already cases where EU countries are (illegally) refusing entry to refugees from Ukraine who are not Ukrainian citizens. When the war started, Ukrainians already could legally travel in the EU for three months visa-free. And under a special law the EU just invoked, Ukrainian refugees can stay for a year without asylum, and that can be extended to three years.

But everyone will soon see that the refugees are not only middle-class women with small children who need short-term support and then will go back home, but also individual men and women of all ages as well as adolescents and children. Assuming that Russia continues as they are at present, we're looking at as many as 10 million refugees, many of whom unlikely to go back to Ukraine any time soon, and many of them never. I saw someone recently saying that a lot of them don't need temporary assistance, they need a new homeland.

And with 10 million refugees, there will also be very sick people, criminals, and many people severely traumatized and people without easily marketable skills among them. That's why the response can only be handled responsibly with solid governmental direction, from the EU and national governments. The rightwing has a big menu of anti-refugee stereotypes ("economic migrants," "freeloaders", "criminal foreigners", "don't speak our language," etc.) that they are already skilled at using. To the extent that Russian information operations are able, they will boost the xenophobic message, like they did in 2015-16. What will make the different is primarily how the center-right and center-left react to the xenophobic demagoguery. I see zero chance that the rightwingers won't use it. In the 2015-16 crisis, most center-right and center-left parties reacted with some version of "we hate the refugees, too, but we're politer about it than the hard right."

In just two weeks of war, the EU already has more refugees that have arrived than for the entire two years of 2015-16. And as many as four times more could be coming in relatively short order. The EU economies are so deeply integrated and everyone can see what a mess Brexit has been that any talk about an "existential crisis" for the EU is overblown at this point. But how bad it gets really does ride on how willing the center-right and center-left politicians are willing to actually push back against the xenophobic politics and *not* play duck-and-cover like they did in 2015-16.

There is another kind of "pushback," though. The term is used to describe the expulsion of asylum seekers without allowing them to apply for asylum. This is flat-out illegal in international law on refugees. But that's exactly what Poland did in the Belarus incident last year. And the EU endorsed that illegal policy on Poland's part. (The United States and Australia also use this illegal, disgraceful practice.)

Poland is currently accepting a huge number of Ukrainian refugees. Most of the two million or more that have arrived in the EU enter through Poland. But Poland is also practicing illegal pushbacks against third-country citizens from African and South Asian countries that are fleeing Poland. (Lorenzo Tondo and Emmanuel Akinwot, People of colour fleeing Ukraine attacked by Polish nationalists Guardian 03/02/2022)