Russian President Vladimir Putin’s prospective invasion of Ukraine will create a major refugee crisis for the European Union, according to a senior Ukrainian defense official who cautioned European officials not to underestimate the scope of the looming conflict.
“It will be a lot of refugees,” Ukrainian Defense Minister Oleksii Reznikov said in a Wednesday interview with the BBC. “It will be a disaster for Europe because this war is not only [in the] east of Ukraine. This war is going in [the] east of Europe. I am seriously saying.”
That warning underscores the potential that an expanded Russian invasion of Ukraine would present the wider European continent with overlapping political and economic crises. An exodus from Ukraine could surpass previous refugee crises because Ukrainian citizens are much closer at hand than Middle Eastern refugees, and a 2017 deal between Ukraine and the EU “abolished” the previous requirement for Ukrainians to obtain a short-stay visa before visiting the countries of the Schengen Area.
“They have a land border with four different countries, and they have visa-free travel to those countries,” former Estonian President Toomas Hendrik Ilves said last week during a Center for European Policy Analysis event. “So you can just come across the border in your car.”
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Such a crisis holds the potential to shake European politics, as former German Chancellor Angela Merkel learned following her embrace of Syrian refugees in 2015. That controversy influenced the debate over the campaign for the United Kingdom to leave the EU, and European officials think Ukrainian refugees would be viewed with similar skepticism.
“Brexit, you know, it wasn’t [only] because of the refugee crisis coming from Syria and the Middle East, but it’s partly also because of [migration from] Poland,” a Central European diplomat opined. “So it’s something that can really create a big mess.
A new refugee crisis might be only one of the nonmilitary difficulties that would arise from the conflict.
“I would add another thing to that list, which is energy. … Europe will need to face a reality in which they could be facing an energy crisis,” CEPA president Alina Polyakova said, “because Russia will use — and it has used — energy as a way to get Europe lassoed up and push them against whatever the U.S. strategy might be in terms of getting sanctions on board. And I don’t think anybody is fully prepared for what that is going to look like.”
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Ilves estimated that there could be “3 or 4 million Ukrainians” pouring over the border into neighboring states. Reznikov offered a lower figure — but flagged the threat specifically for Germany and Poland.
“It will be a disaster not only for Ukraine — it will be a disaster for Europe,” he said. “Because probably a couple of million migrants or refugees will be staying on the Ukrainian-Poland border or probably [the border] between Poland and Germany also.”
