By Andrea Dudik, Krystof Chamonikolas & Natalia Ojewska
Lidiia Vasylevska was working as an accountant in Kyiv when Russian forces invaded Ukraine. She fled to Prague, found a different job and settled in a small apartment in a quiet district of the Czech capital.
But more than two years after escaping the bombs, she finds herself caught in potentially a different kind of conflict: an economic tug of war between her home country and the country that’s sheltered her.
The decision to relocate with her two daughters and pets more than 1,000 kilometers (620 miles) away now finds Vasylevska at odds with Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy. He wants refugees to return to keep the war-torn economy running and resist Russia. Much of central and eastern Europe, meanwhile, is enduring a labor shortage, and countries such as Poland and the Czech Republic are reticent to lose people.
The pressure has been increasing since Zelenskyy told Ukrainians in his New Year address they should decide whether they are refugees or citizens—or, as he put it, victims or winners—and it was time for the country to be together. A recent incursion into Russian territory has put Moscow on the back foot and bolstered morale in Ukraine.
“When you hear this, you are made to feel that you didn’t just leave, but you abandoned your country and you are a bad person,” said Vasylevska, 51, who works as a project manager for a non-governmental organization helping refugees. “It shouldn’t matter where you are, every one of us can help in this situation from where they are right now.”
Countries in the region took in millions of refugees in the wake of President Vladimir Putin’s invasion in February 2022.
Governments granted them special status and distributed financial aid, even if, like in the Czech Republic, they since reduced that largesse and have been slow to come up with longer-term measures for housing or access to bank loans.
Poland last month extended legislation that granted refugees access to the labor market and social benefits until September 2025. The extension will give great stability for Ukrainians, said Deputy Interior Minister Maciej Duszczyk. “Our economy needs workers,” he said.
At the start of the war, as many as 17 million Ukrainians—more than a third of the prewar population—fled their homes. More than 6 million remain refugees abroad, according to the United Nations refugee agency, UNHCR. The figure includes about 1.3 million who left for Russia as of the end of last year.
The Ukrainian central bank predicts another 400,000 people will have left the country this year because of hardships such as rolling blackouts and threats to the energy infrastructure. Efforts to “deepen the integration” of Ukrainians in recipient nations has been an incentive, it said in an August 1 report.
Ukrainians had been entering the Polish and Czech labor market for years before the war. When Russia attacked, many returned to their homeland to fight.
Their absence was felt in industries such as construction and transport, according to Jacek Piechota, president of the Polish-Ukrainian Chamber of Commerce. In many companies, they constituted almost a third of the workforce.
Zelenskyy has been trying to get his allies to help get more men of fighting age back to Ukraine, asking them in bilateral meetings for help. Those aged 18 to 60 are prohibited from leaving Ukraine because of the war. In May, a mobilization law was put in place in Ukraine that seeks to replenish the military ranks with hundreds of thousands of troops.
Politicians from Poland to Hungary have said they won’t send refugees back as long as the war rages on.
But there’s also a key economic reason to keep them, especially in countries whose leaderships have been adverse to immigration in recent years. Companies, for example, are being forced to search further afield for workers to fill jobs at newly built car or battery factories.
A 35-year-old Ukrainian man who has lived in southwestern Poland for over a decade, said he believes his new home country needs laborers like him just as much.
Speaking on a condition of anonymity because of the sensitivity over mobilization, he said he feels guilty for staying in Poland but isn’t ready to give up the life he has built in the country. He said he’s been seeing a psychologist to help him cope.
In addition to Ukrainians already settled in Poland before the war, the country still shelters about 950,000 refugees. Their contribution to gross domestic product was between 0.7 percent to 1.1 percent last year, according to a report by the UNHCR and accounting firm Deloitte.
The report found that Ukrainian refugee households in Poland support themselves, with 80 percent of their incomes coming from work, after the arrivals entered the labor market more quickly than expected.
In the Czech Republic, Ukrainian refugees paid almost twice as much in taxes in the first quarter of the year as they received in welfare benefits, Labor Ministry data showed. The country also has the lowest unemployment rate in the European Union, 2.7 percent, making it hard to find workers. Most of the 350,000 Ukrainians in the country are women with children, yet out of those of working age, 72 percent are employed even if mostly in less qualified positions than they held at home.
“To be blunt, many Czech companies depend on Ukrainian refugees’ skills and hard work,” said Tomas Prouza, the head of the main lobby group for Czech retail and hospitality industry. “The construction industry, for example, would come to a complete standstill without Ukrainian workers.”
Ukrainians, though, are embedded in the workforce, according to Artem Zozulia, president of Foundation Ukraine, an NGO based in the Polish city of Wroclaw. The question is where the war goes from here, especially when it comes to recruitment.
“It is important to remember that among the Ukrainians living in Poland are also economic migrants who have been living here for years and they are facing now a moral dilemma,” said Zozulia. “There is a level of concern among the Ukrainian men living in Poland as there is no precise information on what will happen with regard to the mobilization.”
That’s also a hot topic of conversation among displaced Ukrainians in Prague, according to Vasylevska. She’s unsure about the prospect of reuniting with her elder daughter, who has since gone back to Ukraine. “I would still love to go home, to my apartment and my dacha, my friends and the place where my parents are buried,” she said. “But I do realize that almost every day now there are rockets and other things flying around that can hit anywhere at any time.” With assistance from Alexander Weber, Marton Kasnyik, Daniel Hornak, Daryna Krasnolutska, Kateryna Chursina, Olesia Safronova and Slav Okov /Bloomberg
