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25-02-2024
HATFIELD: When she arrived in England almost two years ago, Mila Panchenko thought her months-long journey from the devastated Ukrainian city of Mariupol was over and she could settle down but, after moving home four times since then, the 55-year-old Ukrainian has been declared homeless and her future is unclear. She has nowhere to return to. Her apartment block in the Russian-occupied port city was bombed and then pulled down.
In her room at temporary accommodation for the homeless run by the YMCA youth charity in Hatfield, a town about 18 miles (29 km) north of London, Panchenko says she feels at the mercy of the British government.
“At any time, they can tell me, the war is over, goodbye. Where would I go?” she said.
Panchenko is not alone. Ukrainians are four times more at risk of homelessness than other families in the country, research from the Red Cross shows. And some of the more than 200,000 Ukrainians now living in the United Kingdom worry whether they will ever be allowed to settle in the long-term.
It’s a problem felt across Europe, the United States and Canada, which are still hosting more than 6 million refugees two years after Russia’s Feb. 24, 2022 invasion.
There is deep sympathy for Ukrainians, opinion polls show, but with no end to the war in sight, governments that offered them short-term help now face a much bigger bill than they expected and are looking to control the spending.
In the past few days, Britain has halved to 18 months the time it allows new arrivals to stay initially and closed a scheme allowing Ukrainians to join family members in Britain, saying it was streamlining the provision.
It has also pared back some refugee support funding for local councils, similar to cuts being considered by Ireland and already made by several eastern European nations.
Earlier this month, Poland, which houses around a million Ukrainian refugees, extended welfare assistance to them, but only until June, a departure from EU guidance that members should continue support until March 2025. Poland has said it might lower payments going forward.
Some administrations are also sensitive to the wishes of the government in Kyiv, which wants Ukrainian refugees to return eventually to help rebuild the country.
While it offered an 18-month visa extension last week to Ukrainian refugees already in the country, the British interior ministry said it supported “the hope of the Government of Ukraine that their citizens will eventually return”.
But Panchenko has no home to return to in Mariupol. She wants to make a life in Hatfield, which developed as an overflow from London after World War Two.
“First of all, I would like to thank this country,” Panchenko said in her room, where a painting of the Ukrainian capital Kyiv she bought in a charity shop takes pride of place. (Int’l News Desk)
