Border farce: Britain is failing Ukraine’s refugees

‘The British government is not turning anybody around,’ Priti Patel told her French counterpart last weekend. ‘Ukrainian refugees are welcome in the UK.’ She doubled down on her claims in the House of Commons on Monday: ‘It is wrong to say that we are just turning people back; we are absolutely not.’ You don’t have to spend long in Calais to disprove the Home Secretary’s claims. As we checked into our hotel at 1.30 a.m. on Tuesday, we saw seven Ukrainian refugees resting on the couches in the lobby.

There was nothing eye-catching about the group, apart from their obvious weariness and the pile of Ukrainian passports and documents on the table in front of them. We met Mohamed and his wife, Tanya, who left Kiev with their daughter when Russia began its invasion of Ukraine. Mohamed studied at Brighton University in 2014 and the family speak English, so they wanted to go to Britain. They travelled through Bratislava, then Vienna, Munich and Paris, but here the journey stopped. French border officials ‘told us you’re not allowed to enter the train because you have to get a visa to reach London’. They were turned around then. They travelled to Calais, hoping they’d have better luck at the ferry port, but so far they continue to be turned back.

They were running out of cash and were in the hotel lobby because they couldn’t afford rooms. ‘Our bank card doesn’t work,’ Mohamed said. ‘Most Ukrainian bank cards don’t work here.’ It’s a common theme among the refugees we spoke to: the lifestyles they enjoyed at home a mere four weeks ago are not affordable here. ‘I had to find a hotel,’ said one young Ukrainian woman, ‘and the cheapest one was €60. And for Ukraine, that’s like a huge amount of money.