Bulgarian authorities have launched a new census system for refugees who fled Ukraine to escape the war, which is now taking place in a special center on the border.
Bulgarian Prime Minister Kirill Petkov visited the facility on the first day of its operation on Tuesday. It is located at the crossing of a bridge over the Danube that connects Romania with Bulgaria, near the Bulgarian city of Ruse.
“The problem was that (the refugees) were coming in and we were not able to know where they were going. “Now everything can be verified,” Petkov explained, according to the Bulgarian national news agency BTA.
Bulgaria, however, is at this stage mainly a transit country for refugees from Ukraine.
Of the 81,000 people who arrived in the country via Romania after Russian troops invaded Ukraine on February 24th, less than 38,000 remain in Bulgaria, the EU’s poorest member state.
Among them are members of the Bulgarian minority in Ukraine. As of yesterday, only 267 had applied for refugee status in the country by the Bulgarian authorities, according to the Bulgarian border guards.
Refugees from Ukraine are temporarily housed in hotels and holiday homes, mainly on the Bulgarian Black Sea coast, as well as in the homes of volunteers, friends and relatives. Many of them are offered jobs by Bulgarian companies, especially in the IT sector.
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