With the Great Recession, the European Debt Crisis, and the COVID-19 pandemic, the past fifteen years have been remarkably difficult for the European Union. In early 2022, the next major challenge emerged: the Russian Invasion of Ukraine and the resulting refugee crisis. As of writing, there are currently more than five million Ukrainian refugees in neighbouring European countries. An additional 6.5 million are displaced within Ukraine itself, and as the war progresses, it is possible the situation will worsen, as more and more people cross international borders to find safety. Most deeply affected will be those countries that border Ukraine to the west: Poland, Hungary, Slovakia, and Romania.
Prior to the invasion, you would have been forgiven for assuming that Eastern European countries would resist a major influx of asylum seekers. After all, in 2015, when the EU was struggling to manage a huge wave of refugees (arriving from primarily Syria, Iraq and Afghanistan), these four countries in particular were hesitant to open their borders. The Polish government, magnanimously, offered to accept just 100 Syrian refugees between 2016 and 2020, hardly an outpouring of support. Not to be outdone, Slovakia offered to take 200, but they had to be Christian, and Romania was willing to accept a few thousand. Hungary’s nationalist government was particularly strict, building a 523 kilometre-long fence to keep migrants out and forcibly removing more than 71,000 asylum seekers who made it into the country anyway. With this historical record, these four countries may have been expected to show a similar unwillingness to grant Ukrainians asylum in 2022.
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