Poland is preparing for a mass influx of refugees if Russia attacks Ukraine. “We have to be prepared for the worst case scenario, and [έχουμε] take steps to be prepared for a wave up and a million people “Deputy Secretary of the Interior Maciej Wąsik told POLITICO on Polish Radio in the wake of relevant information from the US.
The Polish government has pledged solidarity with Ukraine as tensions with Russia escalate, and those who leave the country in the event of a Russian invasion will be “real refugees” and receive assistance, Wąsik said.
“According to the Geneva Convention, these people will be under the protection of Poland and we will certainly not say no to helping them,” he added.
Ukraine borders several EU members, Poland, Romania, Slovakia and Hungary, but has the closest ties to Poland. However, there are doubts as to whether Poland has the capacity to deal with such a large influx of people from any Russian-Ukrainian war.
The Ukrainians have visa-free entry into the EU, and Ukraine borders the EU – which means that the Polish authorities will not be able to claim that refugees should seek asylum elsewhere. The Polish Interior Ministry told POLITICO that it was “constantly monitoring the situation in relation to the crisis on the Ukrainian-Russian border.”
“The situation is being analyzed on an ongoing basis in close co-operation with the Border Guard and the Aliens Office, including the availability of places in centers for foreigners,” the ministry said. The Polish ministry did not answer questions about the specific steps it has taken to handle the scenario described by Wąsik.
Analysts doubt whether Poland can host such a large number of refugees despite Warsaw’s assurances to the contrary.
“To say that Poland will help a million people fleeing war it’s just irresponsible ” commented Agnieszka Kosowicz, head of the Polish Immigration Forum, an NGO that promotes the rights of immigrants in Poland. There are already more than one million Ukrainians in Poland who have arrived in search of better jobs and have virtually become part of Polish society. But a sudden influx of hundreds of thousands of people fleeing war and death is not something Poland will be able to deal with, agrees Jan Piekło, Poland’s former ambassador to Ukraine.
“The Polish government knows – or should know – that the crisis will be very different. It will be a wave of terrified people trying to find a safe place is not immigration for jobs that extend over time so people take care of themselves. “Poland will need help,” Piekło explained.
Poland also has little experience of such a crisis. The latest figures from the Aliens Office cover the first nine months of 2021 show that just 5,200 people have applied for international protection, a condition that includes being recognized as a refugee or receiving subsidiary protection. Of this number, most applicants were citizens of Afghanistan and Belarus. There were only 200 Ukrainians.
The UN High Commissioner for Refugees in Warsaw, the UN refugee agency, says it is ready to help as soon as it is requested, said Rafał Kostrzyński, a spokeswoman for the UN High Commissioner for Refugees.
Boomerang is Poland’s attitude towards Greece
It is noted that the nationalist government of Poland rejects steadily for a long time the proposal for EU countries to distribute asylum seekers – a requirement posed by refugee host countries such as Greece and Italy.
The reality of hundreds of thousands of people crossing the border will test Poland very quickly, said Andrew Stroehlein, director of European media at the NGO Human Rights Watch. “In the (immigration) crisis with Belarus, there were ‘only’ thousands of refugees and the Polish authorities, with the full support of the EU, could not even deal with the situation properly,” Stroehlein said.
“This is not a good omen for a scenario with large numbers in the worst case scenario in Ukraine,” he said.
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