Nine bags with the essentials. That’s what Vladykin and his wife brought from Odessa. ‘Thursday we had an hour to pack our things,’ he says, as he unloads the luggage in front of the porter’s lodge of the registration center of the Immigration and Naturalization Service (IND) in Ter Apel. The five-day journey passed through Moldova, Romania, Hungary, Austria and Germany. Their eight-year-old son is still reeling from sleep. In his hand a plastic container with a mini turtle.
Grandma sat next to them in the back seat all those thousands of miles. “I’m 81,” she says. ‘So a child of the war. And now I was in a war again.’
Confusion
Monday is certainly not teeming with Ukrainian license plates in Ter Apel. Since last Friday, about fifty asylum seekers from the invaded country arrived in East Groningen. But much is unclear. Also for IND staff. “I don’t get it anymore,” shouts a security guard at the gate, in despair about the rules governing Ukrainian refugees.
Ukrainians are not asylum seekers, State Secretary Erik van der Burg (Asylum) emphasized last Friday after the Council of Ministers. Unlike war refugees from Syria, for example, they are allowed to travel freely through Europe – thanks to the association agreement that the country signed with the EU in 2017. This also means that Ukrainians, provided they have a passport, can stay in the Netherlands for the first 90 days without a visa.
For Ukrainians without a passport there is the possibility to apply for a ‘short stay’ visa at the IND, which can be extended after 90 days. ‘Ukrainians’, said Van der Burg, ‘can settle with family or friends, in a hotel or other place where they go independently.’
So what brings Ukrainians to Ter Apel? “Internet,” says Vladykin’s wife resolutely. They don’t have any family in the Netherlands, but they found out via the internet that people here speak good English. ‘We are educated people. We would like to get started.’
Separate reception locations
According to the latest figures from the Central Bureau of Statistics, there are 20,311 people with a Ukrainian migration background in the Netherlands. Because Ukrainians who flee to our country will probably first turn to their families for help, it will not immediately be clear how large the refugee flow is.
According to State Secretary Van der Burg, Ukrainians who cannot go to family or elsewhere will be accommodated in separate reception locations, so that the pressure on the asylum seekers centers is not increased further. He is still discussing this with municipalities. But according to Sonja Kloppenburg of the Central Agency for the Reception of Asylum Seekers (COA), ‘some’ of the Ukrainians, namely those who apply for asylum, will indeed end up in the regular reception locations. ‘And there must be room for those people.’
COA has been reaching the limits of its capacity for years. For example, apart from the influx from Ukraine, 7,010 new reception places are needed before 1 July. ‘We have called on municipalities to catch up on this backlog, so that we can start with a clean slate when even more people join.’
No decisions
Ukrainians who apply for asylum in the Netherlands do not have to count on a decision from the IND for the next six months. Van der Burg wrote to the House on Monday that a so-called ‘decision moratorium’ applies to this group, with which decisions can be postponed for up to a year.
The instrument is used more often at times when there is still great uncertainty about how a conflict or war will develop. ‘The government wants to prevent Ukrainians from being immediately allocated a residence permit for five years,’ says professor of migration Arjen Leerkes, affiliated with Maastricht University and Erasmus University.
Leerkes calls it ‘typical’ that Van der Burg emphasizes that Ukrainians are not asylum seekers, because they can settle freely in the Netherlands. “It comes across as a benevolent gesture, but at the same time it seems that he hopes that Ukrainians will keep their own pants up for the period that they stay here.”
Solidarity
The State Secretary has meanwhile appealed to the sense of solidarity of the Dutch. He wants to make it easier for those with ‘an attic or second home’ to receive Ukrainians. “There is no central address for this yet, but there should be clarity about this soon,” he said.
Several private initiatives have already surfaced, including the website underdakoekraine.nl† Dutch people who are willing to take in a Ukrainian can register here.
Initiator Huib van Mierlo and his wife already set a good example. ‘The children are out of the house, so we have a room with a bathroom available,’ he says. Given the conscription for Ukrainian men, he expects that mainly women and children will arrive. ‘They belong in a homely environment, where they can wait in peace to see what happens next.’
It remains to be seen whether the family of Vladykin, who comes from Odessa, can count on Dutch hospitality. In ter Apel, they first await a PCR test to check whether they are corona-free. What will happen next is a big question mark. “We’ve seen pictures of the shelter,” said Vladykin’s wife, with a dubious face. “But anything is better than staying in Ukraine.”