Temporary for good: the emergency status that millions of Ukrainians can’t leave

Alina's son has just turned eighteen. When she took him away from Dnipro in September 2022, he was a young boy; today he is studying hospitality and tourism at a vocational school in Monza and lives with his mother in a flat provided by Italy's Reception and Integration System (Sistema di accoglienza e integrazione, SAI) in Bellusco, in the Brianza area north of Milan.

Alina, 38, worked in a bank in Ukraine; here she sells shoes in a shopping centre. In her first year she didn't want to learn Italian: "I thought it would all be over soon and we'd go back." Then she stopped making predictions: "I live one day at a time. We don't know what will happen tomorrow, or the week after."

On 30 July, the Council of the EU extended Temporary protection – the system that gives Ukrainians access to a residence permit, the right to work and access to healthcare and schooling in EU countries – until 4 March 2028. For the first time, it also attached a condition: new applicants must prove that they left Ukraine legally and that they have complied with their military obligations. The rule does not affect those already protected in the same country.

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As long as he stays in Italy, Alina's son risks nothing. But if he wanted to study or work in Germany or France, he would count as a new applicant. "It's a critical point," says Viktoryia Vaitovich, a researcher at Ca' Foscari University of Venice, where she works on RESTART, a project on people displaced from Ukraine. "It affects family dynamics and the decision about returning. And it could hit young people who were minors when they arrived here and have since come of age."

An exception that became the rule

In March 2022, the EU did something unprecedented: for the first time, it activated the Temporary Protection Directive. Drafted in 2001 in the wake of the war in Yugoslavia and never used before, it allows people to bypass the asylum procedure: an immediate permit, access to work, healthcare and schooling, and freedom of movement between member states. It was an emergency response, meant to last one year, and it has been extended ever since.

"The problem isn't that temporary protection failed," says Agnieszka Kulesa of the Center for Social and Economic Research in Warsaw, "but that it wasn't accompanied in time by long-term planning." Başak Yavçan of the Migration Policy Group goes further: "The fundamental flaw is that the status is defined by an expected return, not by actual residence. Four years of work, school and taxes don't add up to anything lasting."

Years spent under temporary protection do not count towards long-term resident status under EU rules. Scholars call it "protracted temporariness." The people living it describe it differently.

Italy: life on hold

In Italy, Ukrainians' permits expire on 31 December. Brussels decides on the extension in the summer; Rome transposes it through its end-of-year decree, the so-called Milleproroghe ("thousand extensions" decree – the most recent being Decree-Law 201/2025). "It comes out three days before the deadline, Ilaria Corna, who has run emergency reception centres and dispersed-housing projects across Milan, Monza and Lecco, recalls. While people wait for the renewal, she explains, they are left without cover: "With an expired permit and no appointment at the police immigration office, you lose your health service registration, the universal child allowance, the nursery subsidy. Your life is put on hold."

The same calendar weighs on the search for housing: few landlords will rent to someone whose permit is valid for only twelve months. Those outside the reception system often end up on the informal rental market. Angelica, who came from Kharkiv, works seasonal jobs in tourism between Veneto and Trentino and lives in sublet rooms without a contract.

Without a contract she can't register her residence; without residence she can't get an ID card; without an ID card she can't get SPID, the digital identity needed for almost every dealing with the state. "We become people without an identity," she says. "You can't plan even six months ahead. If I end up on the street tomorrow, no one can help me."

Valeriia Guliaieva, 29, a Ukrainian, works as a cultural mediator for Caritas in the province of Sondrio. She describes the case of a young man who had just been hired. With the receipt from the police office he could sign his employment contract, but he couldn't open a bank account until his actual permit arrived, three or four months later. "He's working and can't get paid. It's a vicious circle."

Olha, who has worked as a home carer in Italy for eighteen years, saw her three children arrive in 2022 (the two sons illegally) and then leave again for Germany and France: no one here would rent them a flat. One of them hasn't seen his fifteen-year-old daughter, who still lives in Ukraine, for four years. Under martial law, men of conscription age cannot leave the country. "If he goes back, he won't be able to get out again."

Within Italy’s reception system, Ukrainians – unlike other migrants – got documents right away, the freedom to travel and sometimes the option of turning down accommodation. As a result, some caseworkers and volunteers came to see them as "privileged," as having arrived "making demands".

Monia Copes, who coordinates Caritas's reception work in the province of Sondrio, sees it the other way round. "We were prepared for people in extreme hardship, to whom we would give everything. Instead, people arrived who knew what they wanted. Perhaps they challenged our paternalistic approach, the idea that those who arrive should accept whatever they're given."

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For Vaitovich, this is precisely the lesson Europe should learn: "This case shows that a mobilisation of resources on this scale is possible, and that freedom of movement benefits everyone, governments and people alike. Instead of measuring who is better off and who is worse off, why not draw a lesson from it and apply it to the whole system, for everyone?"

Poland: impossible stability

In Poland, those who arrived after February 2022 were granted a special status under a law passed just days after the invasion, with access to work, healthcare and benefits. Since 2026, anyone who has held that status for at least a year can apply for the CUKR card, a three-year residence permit, more stable but carries any of the support tied to protection. Security comes at the price of  support.

Meanwhile, the special law has become a political battleground. Every time parliament debates amending it, explains researcher Olena Babakova, fear spreads of losing one's rights, and hundreds of thousands of Ukrainians queue at government offices to apply for an ordinary residence permit.

Anna, 21, arrived in Poland with her family in March 2022 and is now in the second year of a master's degree. Looking for a flat, she ran into a paradox: "They ask a Ukrainian tenant for far more proof: that you're solvent, that you'll stay a long time, that your life has a certain stability. You have to prove you're stable at exactly the moment your life no longer is, because of migration."

Anna worked at an online hate monitoring project; then she and her colleagues were themselves targeted, with screenshots of their personal pages circulated online. "I seriously feared for my safety, and above all for the safety of my loved ones."

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‘The fundamental flaw is that the status is defined by an expected return, not by actual residence. Four years of work, school and taxes don't add up to anything lasting’ – Başak Yavçan

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Karyna Filonenko, a Ukrainian blogger in Kraków, couldn't find a single landlord willing to rent to her family in March 2022 and spent six months in temporary shelters in Muszyna and Krynica-Zdrój. On her blog, she collects episodes of everyday hostility, such as a pregnant friend who was insulted in Warsaw for speaking Ukrainian. She says she fears for her children in public places. 

Karyna has nonetheless decided to stay: "I have no intention of leaving Poland. I want to carry on with my life here."

The view from Kyiv

The Ukrainian government isn't forcing anyone to return, but it fears losing workers and men available for mobilisation. The Ministry of National Unity, created at the end of 2024 to maintain ties with Ukrainians abroad and encourage their return, was dissolved less than a year later amid corruption allegations against its minister, Oleksiy Chernyshov.

Ukrainian analysts are cautious. According to the Centre for Economic Strategy in Kyiv, around 1.6 million people will return once the war is over. "Almost 80% of those who are considering returning are only prepared to do so once the war has completely ended," notes researcher Iryna Ippolitova. According to UNHCR, on 30 June 2026, 5.68 million refugees from Ukraine have left Ukraine since February 2022 and were living outside Ukraine, 5.16 million of them are in Europe and 4.43 million in the EU.

Volodymyr Skrypets of the Laboratory of Legislative Initiatives estimates that, realistically, 30 to 40% of those who left will come back, with sharp differences by age: among young people, the likelihood is 20–25% lower than among the over-45s. He also foresees a rift: "A potential conflict is emerging between those who fought for Ukraine and those who left. It's a social conflict that, unfortunately, we cannot avoid."

Questions for Brussels

In 2022 the Union acted as a bloc. "At the beginning we saw strong European leadership and an aspiration to harmonise the rules," says Vaitovich. "Over time we've moved from a unanimous, collective response to the discretion of member states."

In June 2025, the Commission recommended that member states help Ukrainians move from temporary protection to other national permits, for work, study or family reasons. It did not, however, propose a common model: each government decides for itself. There is also an EU long-term resident status which, after five years of legal residence, grants a stable permit recognised throughout the Union. But years spent under temporary protection don't count. Some organisations had called for them to be included when the directive was revised, but the amendment was not adopted.

So each country is building its own exit route. Italy lets people convert protection into a work permit if they have an employment contract. Poland offers the CUKR card. "If access to long-term status depended mainly on ordinary migration criteria, it would create inequality between different categories of people under temporary protection," warns Ievgeniia Bulgakova of the Ukrainian organisation The 10th of April. The elderly, people with disabilities, single mothers: those who can't prove an income risk being left with no alternative.

Temporary protection expires on 4 March 2028. Neither Rome, nor Warsaw, nor Brussels has yet said what will happen the day after.

This reportage was produced with the support of Journalismfund Europe, in collaboration with Sofia Nazarenko and Artur Koldomasov.

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