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Britains response to the Ukraine refugee crisis has been branded a source of shame by the Trade Unions Congress (TUC), with the union group accusing ministers of taking a slow and mean-spirited approach.

In a letter to Boris Johnson, TUC general secretary France OGrady said the government had fallen short of the humanity, common decency and urgent action that ordinary working people in Britain expect in responding to the millions of Ukrainians fleeing the Russian invasion in recent weeks.

She called on the prime minister to replicate the actions of countries across Europe and open up visa free travel to all those fleeing conflict and war, both from Ukraine and around the world, adding that sufficient funding must be provided to support refugees when they arrive in the UK.

Extending her concerns to the governments wider approach to immigration and asylum, Ms OGrady said ministers should scrap the Nationality and Borders Bill - a piece of legislation currently going through Parliament - warning that it would give UK refugees an even colder welcome.

Britains offer to help Ukrainian refugees has been widely criticised after it refused to introduce visa-free travel to those fleeing, instead introducing a family scheme a week after the start of the war allowing Ukrainians with relatives who are settled in the country to join them.

Refugees have struggled to navigate the schemes application process, which has required many to travel to visa centres, sometimes located many miles away, and forced some to wait for hours in the cold. The Home Office subsequently eased the requirements and since Tuesday refugees with passports have been able to apply online.

On Monday, more than a fortnight after Russia invaded, the UK government announced a separate scheme which will allow Ukrainians with no family links to come to the UK and live in homes offered by members of the public, with access to work and public funds.

The Independent is raising money for the people of Ukraine if you would like to donate then please click here for our GoFundMe page.

In her letter to the prime minister, Ms OGrady raised concerns about this scheme, warning that it does not grant refugees access to housing benefit which she said creates a real risk of people ending up homeless in cases where a placement breaks down and they need to pay for their own accommodation.

She adds: We urge you now to replicate the actions of countries across Europe and open up visa free travel to all those fleeing conflict and war, from Ukraine and around the world, and to ensure that sufficient funding is provided to support refugees when they arrive in the UK.

While Ms OGrady said she supported the decision to allow Ukrainian refugees to access employment, she said a real welcome would require people to be properly supported to find decent work.

Migrant workers are more likely to be exploited. The language barrier they face, and their precarious immigration status means they are less likely to know their rights and may be afraid to complain if they are being mistreated, the letter states.

Condemning the borders bill, which has returned to the House of Commons this week after being debated by the Lords, the general secretary said: We must ensure that those fleeing future wars do not face an even colder welcome, by stopping the Nationality and Borders Bill.

If the bill is passed many Ukrainians, along with others around the world fleeing conflict, threats to their lives and seeking safety may find themselves treated as criminals and deported, instead of being offered sanctuary.

The legislation, being pushed through by home secretary Priti Patel, would see refugees penalised and possibly criminalised for their method of arrival to the UK, and could see asylum seekers sent to offshore hubs for processing and subjected to pushbacks if they try to reach Britain in small boats.

Ms OGrady called for a universal, non-discriminatory asylum system that treats all refugees, regardless of where they come from, equally adding that the Homes for Ukraine scheme can be no substitute for a properly funded system that provides universal refugee protection.

It comes as the United Nations announced that more than three million people have now fled Ukraine since the Russian onslaught began three weeks ago - the largest exodus in Europe since the Second World War.

Many have fled to neighbouring Poland, Hungary, Moldova, Slovakia and Romania, while some 300,000 people are estimated to have moved onwards to western European countries, such as the UK.

The Home Office has been approached for comment.

The Independent has a proud history of campaigning for the rights of the most vulnerable, and we first ran our Refugees Welcome campaign during the war in Syria in 2015. Now, as we renew our campaign and launch this petition in the wake of the unfolding Ukrainian crisis, we are calling on the government to go further and faster to ensure help is delivered. To find out more about our Refugees Welcome campaign, click here. To sign the petition click here. If you would like to donate then please click here for our GoFundMe page.

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Britains response to Ukraine refugee crisis a source of shame, says TUC - The Independent

As war rages on in neighbouring Ukraine, Slovakia is dealing with the biggest refugee crisis in its history, but the welcoming response of its people and the government is in stark contrast with the last migrant crisis in 2015.

Vyn Nemeck is one of the easternmost villages in Slovakia, lying right on the border and is home to the busiest Slovak border crossing with Ukraine. On the other side lies Uzhhorod the centre of Carpathian Ruthenia and today also the centre for Ukrainian refugees arriving in the country.

The main road to the border does not lead through a village but via a bypass built to ease movement for local citizens. Approximately one kilometre before the border, there is a long line of parked cars, vans, and buses, with only a small space left for cars that need to get closer.

Most of them belong to volunteers who came here to help. Besides Slovak vehicles, many are from Germany and Czechia.

We drove here from Frankfurt right after the invasion started, said Leo. Me and some of my friends packed the van with food, blankets and clothes and drove here, he continued. After they unloaded the material aid, they took as many refugees as they could to Frankfurt and repeated the journey.

This is the third time we are here, he added.

Leos friend Joakim says, solidarity here is incredible. We are tired, but it is worth it.

Coordination improved

Just behind the borders, a provisional tent town has sprung up, providing help for refugees from various religious and civil organisations.

The scene resembles a beehive, with refugees slowly pouring in from the border checkpoint into Slovakia, where they are immediately approached by volunteers offering help and guidance. In this provisional camp, people can get free food, clothes or even some sleep until they get transport elsewhere.

Material aid is organised in two places in Sobrance, the closest town to the border. One belongs to the church and one to a local entrepreneur who offered help.

It is more organised now than it was when it started, also on the Ukrainian side. Sometimes I feel like there is too much help. Some of the tents are repeating themselves, said Pavol, a monk coordinating the volunteers of the Order of Malta a Catholic order that has set up several tents.

In the beginning, it was just us and a few independent volunteers. Then other organisations came, and the state offered support as well, he said.

The response of Slovakia and other Visegrad countries is surprising. When people were fleeing from Syria, the government was against redistribution quotas for refugees, and most Slovaks were against accepting them.

Only a fraction is staying

According to the latest information from the UN Refugee Agency, as many as 229,000 refugees have crossed the Ukrainian-Slovak borders so far.

Most of them do not stay in Slovakia but continue to other places around Europe where they have friends or family.

In Vyn Nemeck, many people are offering rides to Bratislava, Brno, Vienna, or even Germany. Some of them wait patiently, with signs, while organisations have their own buses or collect people for buses offered by others.

The government set up a refugee camp in Humenn, a nearby city for those who have nowhere to go. Regional municipalities are helping with their own capacities.

According to the interior ministry, only about 6,000 Ukrainian refugees have so far asked for asylum.

One of those wishing to stay is Olga, a teacher from Kyiv, and her 16-year old son Gleb.

I didnt want to leave, but when I heard about the attack on the nuclear power plant, I changed my mind, she said.

Olga explained that she did not expect Russia to invade, and neither did her friends and colleagues. We were just living our lives. I dont understand why Putin is doing this to us, she said.

Olga and Gleb are some of the more fortunate ones as they have friends in Slovakia who decided to take them in. Asked if she wants to go back home, she said yes, without hesitation.

I love Ukraine, she concluded.

[Edited by Zoran Radosavljevic/Alice Taylor]

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Dispatch from Slovak border: 'We don't understand why Putin is doing this to us' - EURACTIV

When Jenny Yurshanskys parents fled Soviet-era Moldova in 1978, they could take only a handful of items with them what would fit, essentially, into two small suitcases. No valuables were allowed, only essentials for survival; they could bring less than $300 cash and no documentation of education.

Michael and Rima Yurshansky stuffed clothing and blankets into their bags. Rima packed an embroidered infants hat and an alphabet baby book for her soon-to-be born daughter, Jenny. Yurshansky was born in Rome months later in January 1979, and her parents asylum seekers at the time, waiting for permission to gain entry into the U.S. eventually settled in Northridge. The objects theyd carted from Eastern Europe became an integral part of their new home in California.

Now those items have informed an exhibition centering family migration and the inherited trauma of exile, a timely topic as more than 2.5 million Ukrainians have fled the country in recent weeks since Russias invasion. Yurshansky joins a legacy of artists who have probed themes of displacement, trauma and loss entwined with the global refugee crisis, including photographer Tom Kiefer, who saved and photographed migrant and asylum seekers belongings discarded when they crossed the U.S.-Mexico border, and Chinese artist and human rights activist Ai Weiwei, whose many art and media projects center on the plight of refugees, freedom of expression and life in exile.

Yurshanskys solo exhibition, A Legacy of Loss: There Were No Roses There, on view at American Jewish University through May 12, is composed of five sculptural installations, a multimedia piece and an audio tour. The titular There Were No Roses There (Diaspora) a climbing rose vine made of welded steel that was charred in a kiln and which features glass roses with brass thorns traces three generations of her familys migration to either Argentina, Germany, Israel or the U.S. over the last 100 years. Its also a record of family members killed in World War II.

Jenny Yurshanskys There Were No Roses There (Diaspora).

(From Jenny Yurshansky)

Yurshansky, who now lives in the Lincoln Heights area of Los Angeles, said she was inspired to create the exhibition, which was organized by former AJU chief curator Dr. Rotem Rozental, after trips back to Moldova with her mother in 2016 and 2017.

Id gotten an artist grant from Asylum Arts to take my mom back to Moldova for the first time since fleeing, Yurshansky says. I wanted to explore this theme of what it means to be a refugee, studying my own family as a case study.

The exhibitions through lines are universal, Yurshansky says. To abandon ones home and leave everything behind and come someplace entirely unknown, this brings generational trauma, she explains in this edited conversation. I think theres a lot of denial in the U.S. because theres this myth of Americanness, that our pasts have been erased and our slates wiped clean. That we belong in this space while others dont. Combined with the fact that our families dont want to talk about it, its too painful. The exhibition is meant to provide a place to have open discussions about this hard reality.

Your show is especially timely. Do you think about the exhibition differently now?

The series The Border Will Not Hold, framed embroideries, has taken on a new dimension in light of Russias invasion of Ukraine. The embroideries address how the ideas of nationalism, bigotry and us-versus-them propaganda are weaponized by states, pitting populations against one another. Its a pattern that we know very well here in the U.S. and, of course, happens worldwide. Russia resuming its place at the center of this pattern is just another inevitable turn of history.

These pieces each a Moldovan folk embroidery pattern collaged with Soviet-era imagery taken from Cyrillic alphabet primers explore how systemic suppression, oppression and revisionist propaganda can be masked in charming presentations of folk traditions and materials. The books are filled with Soviet propaganda and, along with the alphabet, they are embedded with jingoistic ideas, notions of who belongs, support of the militarized state and how to be a good Soviet. The folk embroidery patterns while beautiful have a much darker side to them. The shadows cast by the delicate embroidery work on the surface of the silk chiffon is a reminder to be wary of both the benign and overt ways in which the threat of nationalism is represented.

The Border Will Not Hold, traditional Moldovan embroidery patterns combined with baby book imagery, with shadows projected on the wall.

(From Jenny Yurshansky)

How did you experience the inherited trauma of your parents refugee experience?

The period in which my mother became pregnant with me was extremely stressful. Because my mother and father sought to leave the Soviet Union as refugees, they lost their jobs and the waiting period could easily take a year. Her doctor advised her to only gain 15 pounds because there were no epidurals used in the USSR. She literally carried me within her over borders from the Soviet Union, enduring an unnecessary and botched C-section in an Italian hospital because there was no one to advocate for her. Added to that stress, none of my grandparents wanted to join my parents in trying to seek asylum in the U.S. They all immigrated to Israel instead, which was extremely distressing to my mother who was incredibly close to her parents. I was born stateless in Rome while they waited.

The severe stress my mother experienced resulted in physical and psychological traits of mine that are an imprint of my mothers trauma. I have scoliosis which does not run in my family which required spinal fusion surgery. I am significantly shorter and smaller than the rest of my family, and I have ADHD. Research has shown there is often a link between ADHD and childhood trauma. The works in this show are meant to relay to the visitor the difficulty of accessing buried memories due to trauma and how we carry these traumas in our bodies and pass them on to the next generations.

Your mom helped you sew several textile works in the show how does sewing connect you, your mom and your grandmother?

Sewing, part of my practice, is done to honor my maternal grandmother, a couture seamstress whose dreams were dashed by war; but it is also because she could sew that she survived the war. It was from her that we both learned to sew. Sewing these laboriously detailed pieces with my mom is a strategy I have found that has helped us find a common space to reckon with what it means to be a refugee. My mother will never directly answer my questions about the past. I have found that in the hours we spend sewing and sitting together through silences, sharing the frustrations and rewards of intricate embroidering and large-scale pieces, allows a space for memories to bubble up and come to the surface.

Jenny Yurshanskys Unfolded Narratives.

(From Jenny Yurshansky)

Tell us about Unfolded Narratives, a large-scale, quilted tapestry in the exhibition created, in part, by students in Jewish day schools across Los Angeles.

During workshops held at AJU, I led students from schools including Milken Community School, De Toledo High School and Shalhevet High School on a journey to discover their voices by exploring their own family narratives of immigration, change and resilience. These stories traverse the globe from Iran to New York and were expressed through collages, drawn images and narratives which were then folded into playful paper fortune-tellers. With my mother, I have transformed these small, crafted sculptures into Unfolded Narratives, which invites us to see how all our stories are connected and pieced together.

How does work in the exhibition speak to a refugees experience of hastily gathering family artifacts before fleeing home?

There Were No Roses There (Echo) is a wall-based rubbing of a traditional woven carpet from Moldova. The wall surrounding it is stained to mimic tobacco residue. It reflects the complicated meeting points of family traditions, domestic spaces and the various ways questions of home and belonging radiate outward, on a national level. The work, the residue of a carpet, is a negative space as if a wall carpet were removed, leaving the echo of its fibers behind. One could imagine this being the residue of those who left as well as a shadow of the memories that they hold within them.

Theres an interactive audio guide in the show in which participants can roam AJUs campus and encounter blacklisted species of plants. Whats the concept here and how does it relate to migration?

Blacklisted: A Planted Allegory (Audio Guide) explores the sociopolitical constructs of borders and belonging by questioning the scientific classification of plants as native, non-native or invasive species. Listeners are invited to encounter these plants on a choose-your-own-adventure style audio walking tour or as a radio-style drama. It is a web-based field guide for listeners to acquaint themselves with non-native plants commonly found in California. Each plant is performed by an actor who anthropomorphizes it through a narrative, channeling its unique history and experience in arriving and settling here.

These are the stories of generations of migrants. What these plants offer us reflects a landscape that is cultural as much as it is botanical, everything from humble weeds to deliberate landscaping. The experience is meant to familiarize the audience with these plants to better understand the ways in which the landscape is not only botanical but historical and cultural the result of human settlement. The listener can experience the plants as a reflection of the people, history, see how they are a part of that narrative, and engage in the often contentious but nevertheless important issues of colonization, migration, borders, citizenship, belonging and otherness.

'A Legacy of Loss'

Where: American Jewish University, Marjorie and Herman Platt Gallery, 15600 Mulholland Drive, Los AngelesWhen: by appointment only 10 a.m.-4 p.m. Mondays-Thursdays; walk-through with the artist select Sundays; through May 12Cost: freeInfo: arts.aju.edu; for appointments, arts@aju.edu

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L.A. artist examines her family history of displacement and loss - Los Angeles Times

Better late than never, said John Ashmore on CapX. After taking pelters from all sides for its grudging response to the Ukrainian refugee crisis, the Government finally unveiled a plan this week to house people fleeing Russias war.

Under a scheme dubbed Homes for Ukraine, Ukrainians who have a sponsor in the UK can immediately apply for a visa; others will later be matched to British residents who have registered their interest in hosting a refugee. Would-be hosts will be vetted, and identity checks completed on refugees to allay security concerns. As a thank you from the Government, households that take someone in will receive 350 a month; and local authorities will get 10,500 extra funding per refugee for services such as mental health support and education.

There is no cap on numbers and within two days of the schemes launch, 122,000 people had already offered help, said Emma Yeomans in The Times. Among the first to be housed were Niyara Mamontova and her seven-year-old daughter Eleanora who, after fleeing Kharkiv and asking for help on Facebook, were sponsored by a family in Hampshire. It was amazing, said Mamontova of her online appeal. So many people were there to help.

The generosity shown by the British people stands in stark contrast to the shameful nature of their governments early response to this crisis, said Ian Birrell in The i Paper. Three million people have been made refugees by Putins atrocities in just three weeks. Yet while other European countries immediately went to great lengths to help, the UK resorted to bureaucratic trickery to evade responsibility. The Government demanded biometric tests, documents, visas and visits to application centres that turned out not to be open anything, it seemed, to tangle up applications from people fleeing Vladimir Putins bombs. The Governments hardhearted and inept response was badly out of step with the public mood, said The Economist. Incredulous Tory backbenchers called [it] robotic, but that is unfair on robots, which are at least efficient.

Even the Governments eventual solution isnt problem-free said, Emily Carver on Conservative Home. Critics have raised concerns over the strength of safety checks on prospective hosts, and asked what happens at the end of the six months. However, it could yet prove a pretty good balance between a completely open-door policy that relies entirely on the state, and one that pulls up the drawbridge. Either way, this should be the crisis that jolts the Home Office into a better way of handling asylum, said Fraser Nelson in The Daily Telegraph.

For too long, ministers have tried to deter asylum seekers from coming to Britain by housing them in decaying hotels at the taxpayers expense, and forbidding them from working while their claims are considered a process that can take months or even years. But as the Channel migrant crisis shows, that deterrent isnt working. And with 1.3 million vacancies in the economy, would it really be so bad to let more refugees work when they get here?

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The problems with Homes for Ukraine - The Week UK

TIJUANA, MEXICO As the sun rose over the San Ysidro port of entry Thursday, Mikhail lay curled over his wife, donated blankets covering them and their makeshift cot. An arms length from where the Russian couple slept, coils of barbed wire hung low, a reminder that they are not currently welcome on the U.S. side of the border.

Mikhail had left Russia in a hurry, two days after the country of his fathers birth invaded the country of his mothers. He had been living on borrowed time since 2014, when he ripped up his conscription notice refusing to fight in the war against Crimea. If he was ever caught, he said, it would mean a 15-year prison term.

I will never fight a war where I can kill innocent people, people who might be my cousins, my aunts, Mikhail said in Russian. Its all just wrong.

Mikhail and his wife Natasha are part of a group of Russians, 19 adults and five children, camped out at the San Ysidro border gate, hoping to be allowed into the United States to stake claims of asylum.

Thousands more Russians traveled to this part of the border before the invasion, an exodus that began after the imprisonment of a popular opposition leader last year. They are able to fly into the Central American country without visas, making this leg of the journey simpler than it is for most migrants who arrive here seeking asylum. But once here, they join a migrant crisis that has only grown more complex since former President Trump closed the border to asylum seekers because of the pandemic.

The Chronicle is identifying migrants by their first names, as all expressed fear of retaliation if they were returned to Russia.

Kristina, a Ukrainian refugee and former nail salon owner from Kiev, who has been denied entry to the U.S. three times, pleads with a U.S. Customs and Border Protection officer to reconsider. She said she feels so tired of all this, two weeks of this back and forth. I feel empty. There is no country to go back to in Ukraine. Photographed at the San Ysidro port of entry in Tijuana, Mexico on Thursday, March 17, 2022.

Mikhail has a cousin in Cupertino. His goal is to make it to her home, and from there, start to rebuild the life he suddenly abandoned in Russia.

Yet Mikhails Russian passport is as big a problem as Title 42, a Trump-era policy the Biden administration continues to enforce, which cites the COVID-19 pandemic as a basis for the rapid expulsion of migrants and has effectively shut the border to asylum seekers.

On Thursday, Homeland Security Secretary Alejandro N. Mayorkas told reporters that Border Patrol agents were reminded they have some leeway with regard to enforcing Title 42, particularly when it comes to those fleeing the crisis in Ukraine, BuzzFeed News reported.

This was policy guidance that reminded (border officers) of those individualized determinations and their applicability to Ukrainian nationals as they apply to everyone else, the online news outlet quoted Mayorkas as telling reporters.

This follows a March 11 Department of Homeland Security memo informing U.S. Customs and Border Protection that the agency can, on a case-by-case basis, let those with valid Ukrainian documents bypass Title 42 restrictions that would otherwise keep them from crossing the border because of the unjustified war of aggression in Ukraine and the humanitarian crisis its caused.

DHS didnt immediately respond to questions about whether its discretionary guidance could be applied to Russian migrants who oppose their government's war and fear what may happen if theyre forced to return.

When Russias latest war began, Mikhail, a photographer and designer, shuttered his familys printing press in the lakeside town of Pereslavl-Zalessky and joined thousands of others who have reportedly fled Russia, fiercely opposed to their governments war in Ukraine.

As it is for many, the war is personal for Mikhail. While he grew up in Russia, he feels equally Ukrainian, having spent his life visiting his mothers siblings and their children there. Now his little cousins are refugees in Poland, their fathers still at home, part of the Ukrainian resistance.

As Mikhail began what has become his morning ritual folding his blankets and neatly stacking them on a picnic chair, followed by some calisthenics a handful of Ukrainian families presented their blue passports to border officials and walked into San Diego.

The 35-year-old said he didnt begrudge border authorities decision to let them cross, but wondered if he and his wife will get the same chance. Despite being a son of both nations, he and Natasha have only Russian passports.

Tell me what should I/we do? Mikhail asked in a translated text to The Chronicle Wednesday evening. What should the people who came here and they are against the war, they are against Putin and his regime, (do)?

Some residents of Tijuana who walked across the border headed to work or school in San Diego, eyed the group of white migrants, remarking in Spanish that they were being treated better than the darker-skinned migrants they usually encounter here.

Its a reality not lost on Julia, a 26-year-old Russian IT worker who fled her St. Petersburg home the day Russian President Vladimir Putin began waging war. Thursday was her fourth day at the border gate.

She said she realized other migrants before her have been cleared out from the small patch of concrete that she and her fellow Russians currently occupy. Maybe it's because we're Europeans, Julia said. That's not fair, I think.

Yet here she stays, sleeping on nothing more than a couple of blankets, far from her life in St. Petersburg.

Julia said the group shes with has refused offers of shelter from Mexican officials because of their homegrown distrust of government. Interacting with the authorities in Russia (during) your life (leaves) the most insecure feeling, so here (the Russian migrants) are just afraid, she said. If they leave the border gate, she suggested, maybe they wont be allowed back.

Russian refugees wait at the U.S.-Mexico border outside the San Ysidro port of entry in Tijuana on Wednesday, March 16, 2022.

Julia and her husband, Anton, 27, an American literature Ph.D. candidate and English teacher, were active protesters last year when Russian opposition leader Alexei Navalny was imprisoned. Police cracked down hard. The couple escaped arrest, but others were not so lucky.

I feel this guilt because I couldn't do anything and they were beating the people who were protesting with us, Julia said.

The day before Russia invaded Ukraine was a normal one for the couple. Julia attended a yoga class and stopped by the bakery. When she arrived at the apartment, Anton said he believed that their president was about to attack Ukraine.

They left Russia the next morning.

Julia feared Anton would get conscripted to serve. I don't want him to participate in this (war) because it's a crime, she said.

So they wait at the U.S.-Mexico border, passing time below the spirals of barbed wire. The only English-speakers of the group, they keep busy translating for their fellow Russians. Anton speaks fluent Spanish as well, so he translates when Mexican officials or volunteers come by with food and offers of shelter.

Anton says he thinks often of family and friends he left behind. They connect by WhatsApp constantly. He hopes the Biden administration will begin to recognize dissident Russians like him and his wife, stalled at the fourth busiest land border in the world, as refugees in need of a home.

Of the home he left, he said, I think the most common sentiment in Russia is just fear.

Deepa Fernandes is a San Francisco Chronicle staff writer. Email: deepa.fernandes@sfchronicle.com Twitter: @deepafern

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They protested Putin and fled their country. Now, Russians opposed to the war can't get across the U.S. border - San Francisco Chronicle