Ukraine – COI

Updated on 31/03/2022

UK: The UK has introduced a new visa route, the Ukraine Family Scheme visa. Please see this page for information about how to apply and the relevant eligibility criteria.

The UK have also launched the ‘Homes for Ukraine’ scheme which offers a new visa route to individuals who want to come to the UK and who have someone in the UK willing to provide them with a home. The scheme allows you to live and work in the UK for up to three years. Please see this page for information on the scheme and how to apply.

National Rail is offering free onward travel for Ukrainian nationals arriving in the UK.

EU: The EU has proposed to activate the Temporary Protection Directive which will allow those fleeing Ukraine to be granted temporary protection in the EU. This means that individuals will be granted a residence permit and will have access to education and the labour market. Please see this page for additional information.

Please see this page that the European Commission has published which has detailed information relating to the rights of Ukrainians in the EU, including information on travel, education, healthcare, access to accommodation and jobs. The page also lists relevant links to access further information on individual national authorities and free travel options.

The European Council on Refugees and Exiles have created an information sheet which addresses some of the measures taken by European countries to accommodate Ukrainian nationals arriving on their territory.

Please see the relevant Pro Bono Directory for the country you are in.

Bill Bowring

Email: b.bowring@bbk.ac.uk

Prof Bowring has experience in Ukraine dating back to 1991 when he first travelled to the country to teach a course in human rights for school teachers in Donetsk. In the mid-1990s, Prof Bowring advised the UNHCR and OSCE on the problems faced by the Crimean Tatars in obtaining Ukrainian citizenship. Between 1997 and 2002 he was the contracted Adviser on Law Reform and Human Rights in Russia and Ukraine to the UK Department for International Development. In 2017, Prof Bowring served on the Advisory Board of a UK Government funded project on ‘understanding the outcomes of population displacement from the country’s war torn regions’. Please see the following link for a full breakdown of Prof Bowring’s work in Ukraine. Bill Bowring Experience in Ukraine.docx

Michael Hindley

Email: info@michaelhindley.co.uk

Michael Hindley spent 25 years in elected politics, including three terms as a Euro-MP, when he served as Vice-President of the Trade Committee, and he is a frequent commentator on European and International Politics. He has authored two reports over recent years for the European Economic and Social Committee (EESC) on “EU/Central Asia Relations” both of which had “human rights” chapters and both reports involved arranging hearings where NGOs made presentations about human rights in Central Asia. He has been an election observer for the Organisation for Security and Cooperation (OSCE) in Kazakhstan. He has also acted as an OSCE observer in other post-Soviet countries namely Moldova, Belarus, Russia, Armenia, Azerbaijan and Ukraine and been a guest lecturer in Russia and Ukraine. He was was a Member of the European Parliament from 1984 – 1999.

Dr Richard Connolly

Email: r.connolly@bham.ac.uk

Dr Richard Connolly is senior lecturer in Political Economy and co-director of the Centre for Russian, European and Eurasian Studies at the University of Birmingham. His research and teaching are principally concerned with the political economy of Russia. He is also visiting professor on the Master of Global Public Policy (MGPP) programme at the Russian Presidential Academy of National Economy and Public Administration, member of the editorial board for Eurasian Geography and Economics, and for the Routledge series on Russian and East European Studies, and he is editor of Post-Communist Economies. Dr Connolly has presented his research to a wide range of academic and non-academic audiences, including the Foreign and Commonwealth Office (FCO), the International Trade Committee of the European Parliament, the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD), the European Bank for Reconstruction and Development (EBRD), the Moscow State Institute for International Relations (MGIMO), and the Russo-British Chamber of Commerce (RBCC). He has written extensively about the political economy of Russia, with a focus on the institutional environment and the country’s relationship with the global economy.

Dr. Taras Kuzio

Email: kuziotaras@gmail.com

Taras Kuzio has a BA in Economics from the University of Sussex, an MA in Soviet and Eastern European Studies from the University of London, a PhD in political science from University of Birmingham and was a Postdoctoral Fellow at Yale University. Since 2018 he is a Professor in the Department of Political Science, National University of Kyiv Mohyla Academy, Ukraine and a Non-Resident Fellow at the Center for Transatlantic Relations, School of Advanced International Studies (SAIS), Johns Hopkins University. Taras Kuzio has been a consultant to different branches of the US government, including as team leader on a USAID spring 2015 assessment of democracy, governance and human rights in Ukraine. He is the author and editor of 17 books, including Crisis in Russian Studies? Nationalism (Imperialism), Racism, and War (2020), Putin’s War Against Ukraine: Revolution, Nationalism, and Crime (2017 and 2019), Ukraine: Democratization, Corruption and the New Russian Imperialism (2015), Open Ukraine. Changing Course towards a European Future Democratic Revolution in Ukraine (2011), From Kuchmagate to Orange Revolution (2009), Theoretical and Comparative Perspectives on Nationalism (2007) and Ukraine-Crimea-Russia: Triangle of Conflict (2007). Over a 3-decade journalistic career he has authored 1, 500 articles on post-communist, Ukrainian and Russian politics and international affairs for Foreign Affairs, Foreign Policy, Al Jazeera, Financial Times, UPI (United Press International) and specialist publications by Jane’s Information Group and Radio Free Europe-Radio Liberty.

Olesya Khromeychuk

Email: o.khromeychuk@uea.ac.uk

Olesya Khromeychuk is a Leverhulme Early Career Fellow and Lecturer in European History at the University of East Anglia (UEA). Prior to that she was a Teaching Fellow at University College London (SSEES) and a Lector in Ukrainian at the University of Cambridge. She is an expert on Ukrainian history and conflict, gender and nationalism in contemporary Ukraine. Her recent published works include: “Negotiating protest spaces on the Maidan: a gender perspective” (2016) and “Gender and Nationalism on the Maidan” (2015). She has previously written articles in both English and Ukraine, including work with the Ukrainian Dialogue.

Dr. Tracey German

Email: tgerman.jscsc@da.mod.uk

Dr Tracey German is a Reader in the Defence Studies Department at King’s College, London. Her research focuses on Russia’s relations with its neighbours, and conflict and security in the Caucasus and Caspian region, and she has published widely on these issues. Prior to this she lectured at RMA Sandhurst and the University of Aberdeen, and worked as a research manager for a business intelligence company, specialising in energy security. She is a graduate in Russian from the University of Edinburgh and was awarded a PhD on the topic of Russia’s conflict with Chechnya. She has expertise on the ongoing conflict in Chechnya, security in the Caucasus and Central Asia, and energy issues in the former Soviet states. She is a Russian speaker, has lived in Russia and Ukraine, and travelled extensively across the post-Soviet space.

Dr. Roxana Bratu

Email: r.bratu@ucl.ac.uk

Dr Roxana Bratu coordinates the activity of the ANTICORRP project, investigating the factors that promote or hinder the development of effective anti-corruption policies. She is a research associate at UCL School of Slavonic & East European Studies. She conducted her PhD at the London School of Economics and Political Science (LSE) in the Sociology Department. Her doctoral dissertation focused on the process of accessing European Union funding in Romania. She taught courses on Sociology, Statistics and Criminology. Roxana works on integrity, corruption, transnational aid flows and entrepreneurship in Romania, Ukraine and other former communist countries.

Federica Prina

Email: Federica.Prina@glasgow.ac.uk

Federica Prina is a Research Associate at the School of Social and Political Sciences of the University of Glasgow. She is part of a team implementing the three years (2014-2017) research project ‘National Minority Rights and Democratic Political Community: Practices of Non-Territorial Autonomy in Contemporary Central and Eastern Europe’, funded by the Economic and Social Research Council. Her field of research encompasses cultural, linguistic and participatory rights of national minorities in the post-Soviet space, particularly the Russian Federation, Moldova, Estonia and Ukraine. From 2011 to 2013 she was a researcher at the European Centre for Minority Issues (ECMI), in Flensburg (Germany), where she coordinated the research cluster ‘Culture and Diversity’. From 2012 to 2014 she was the editor of the Journal on Ethnopolitics and Minority Issues in Europe (JEMIE). Federica Prina has also worked for human rights organisations, including Article 19 (the Global Campaign for Free Expression), Amnesty International and Minority Rights Group.

Maria Popova

Email: maria.popova@mcgill.ca

Maria Popova, PhD in Government (Harvard University), is Associate Professor of Political Science and Jean Monnet Chair at McGill University, Montreal, Canada. She is also a the Scientific Co-Director of the Jean Monnet Centre Montreal and a faculty associate at the Institute for the Study of International Development (ISID) at McGill. She is the author of Politicized Justice in Emerging Democracies: A Study of Courts in Russia and Ukraine (Cambridge University Press, 2012), the winner of the 2012-2013 American Association for Ukrainian Studies prize for best book in the fields of Ukrainian history, politics, language, literature, and culture.  Her research focuses on judicial independence, the rule of law, and corruption in the post-Communist region.  She is currently working on a book manuscript on the politics of corruption prosecutions.  She also follows and writes about post-Maidan judicial reform in Ukraine.

Dr. Max Bader

Email: m.bader@hum.leidenuniv.nl

Dr. Max Bader is a lecturer in Russian and Eurasian Studies at Leiden University. Before coming to Leiden University, he was a lecturer and researcher at the University of Amsterdam, the Ludwig Maximilian University of Munich, and the OSCE Academy, and a visiting scholar at George Washington University and the Kyiv-Mohyla Academy. Bader has extensive experience working in research and advocacy projects in Russia and Ukraine. He is a frequent election observer for OSCE/ODIHR in the post-Soviet area, and has carried out policy evaluations for USAID and the Ministry of Foreign Affairs of the Netherlands. His current research project, funded by the Netherlands Organisation for Scientific Research (NWO) is Human Security and Conflict in Ukraine: Local Approaches and Transnational Dimensions.

Dr. Victoria Hudson

Email: victoria.1.hudson@kcl.ac.uk

Dr Victoria Hudson is a British Academy Post-Doctoral Fellow (2016) in the Department of War Studies at King’s College London. She is currently researching Russian cultural influence and political power in Ukraine, Kazakhstan and Estonia, and has previously taught at the University of Birmingham and the University of Leicester. She completed her PhD, entitled ‘A Study of the Civilisational Aspect of Russian Soft Power in Contemporary Ukraine’ in 2013 at the University of Birmingham. In addition to engagement with the relevant bodies of IR and critical security theory, she completed extensive fieldwork in-country, which entailed conducting surveys and focus groups across four cities of Ukraine, in addition to expert interviews in Moscow. During her PhD, Victoria also spent time at the Aleksanteri Institute, University of Helsinki, within the framework of the ESRC’s Overseas Institutional Visit initiative. Prior to continuing her post-graduate studies, Victoria was employed in a research capacity in the private sector.

Dr. Oxana Shevel

Email: oxana.shevel@tufts.edu

Professor Shevel holds a PhD in Government from Harvard University, an M.Phil in International Relations from the University of Cambridge in England, and a BA in English and French from Kyiv State University in Ukraine. She is an Associate at the Davis Center for Russian and Eurasian Studies and the Ukrainian Research Institute at Harvard University, a member of the EUDO Citizenship expert group as a country expert on Ukraine, and a member of the Program on New Approaches to Research and Security in Eurasia (PONARS Eurasia) scholarly network. Prior to coming to Tufts, Prof. Shevel taught at Purdue University and held post-doctoral appointments at the Davis Center for Russian and Eurasian Studies and at the Harvard Ukrainian Research Institute.  Professor Shevel’s research and teaching focus on the post-Communist region surrounding Russia and issues such as nation- and state-building, the politics of citizenship and migration, memory politics, and the influence of international institutions on democratization. She is the author of Migration, Refugee Policy, and State Building in Postcommunist Europe (Cambridge 2011), which examines how the politics of national identity and strategies of the UNHCR shape refugee admission policies in the post-Communist region, leading countries to be more or less receptive to refugees.

European Council on Refugees and Exiles (ECRE)

www.ecre.org
Contact: Claire Rimmer, Eastern Europe Team
Tel: +44 (0)20 7790 2954
Fax: +44 (0)20 7790 4610
Email: crimmer@ecrc.org / ecre@ecre.org

The ECRE London Office can provide up to date COI information about the situation facing refugees and those seeking asylum in the Eastern Europe region. View their website for reports and news or email direct at the contact details provided. You can also sign up to weekly updates which provide current, comprehensive information on refugee issues in Europe.