Halyna Storozhuk is one of the 800,000 Ukrainian citizens who were officially allowed to work in Poland in 2015. That year she received her twentieth work permit. «Someday in my life I want to have the opportunity to live in Poland for a longer time – without these back-and-forth trips,» complains the 67-year-old cleaner and caretaker for the elderly.
For 15 years she has been migrating between Warsaw and Ternopil. A visa with a work permit is usually issued for a period of three to six months. Halyna always tries to return to Poland as quickly as possible in order not to lose her employers. In addition, the Ukrainian woman also financially supports her grandson, who has been studying in Warsaw for several months. «In Ukraine, he has no chance of getting a decent job or salary. Only the rich can afford to live normally there,» she says about her homeland.
According to Mateusz Duszczyk, head of the Center for Migration Research at the University of Warsaw, at the end of 2015 there were about a million Ukrainians in Poland. They, like Halyna, work in various jobs – helping with housework, in construction or agriculture. Since most of them work seasonal jobs, the number of Ukrainians in Poland varies from month to month. In 2015, a total of 924,600 Ukrainians received Polish visas, half of them with the right to enter only Poland, and the other half to all Schengen countries.
However, a little later this figure was interpreted quite differently in order to turn it into a political argument. The information that over 900,000 Ukrainians received a work visa formed the basis of statements by Polish Prime Minister Beata Szydło in February 2016, who claimed that her country had accepted «a million Ukrainian refugees.» However, according to official data, since the beginning of the conflict in Ukraine, only four (!) out of 5,328 asylum seekers have been granted refugee status. All the rest are economic migrants, explained the Ambassador of Ukraine to Poland, Andriy Deshchytsia.
According to Polish government spokesman Rafał Bochenek, the talk of «Ukrainian refugees» is entirely justified. «From a legal point of view, they are not refugees, but in fact they are, because a significant part is fleeing the war to Poland,» he said in an interview with DW. According to him, only a few try to obtain refugee status because most consider the asylum procedure very difficult, not because they do not feel threatened by the war.
However, according to Mirosław Czech from the «Union of Ukrainians in Poland», very few Ukrainians come to the neighboring country from the conflict region. About 70 percent of Ukrainians living in Poland come from the western regions of Ukraine. Given this, they cannot be called refugees. In Czech's opinion, the term «Ukrainian refugees» is used in the government's rhetoric rather to «position themselves against European solidarity on the refugee issue.» Mirosław Czech believes that Warsaw is trying to avoid fulfilling its obligation to accept refugees from the Middle East by showing that supposedly many people have already received asylum in the country.
Robert Tyszkiewicz of the opposition Civic Platform is convinced that statements like «a million Ukrainian refugees» are an attempt to instrumentalize Ukrainian problems. In his opinion, the prime minister tried to draw the international community's attention to the conflict in Ukraine, but «Poland should not shock with numbers to confirm the danger from the East,» he claims.
At the same time, «Ukrainian refugees» cannot be called a «fictitious alibi» for the government, stressed Polish government spokesman Rafał Bochenek. On the contrary: the national-conservative government, which took office in November last year, is trying to fulfill the obligations taken on by the previous liberal-conservative government, according to which Poland must accept exactly 7,082 refugees by the end of 2017 who are currently in Italy, Greece or Lebanon.
But the Polish government spokesman calls the «permanent distribution mechanism» proposed by German Chancellor Angela Merkel a bad idea and calls for new negotiations on the matter. In this context, he points to the common views of the Visegrad Four countries, namely Poland, the Czech Republic, Slovakia and Hungary, on this issue.