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.