Ukrainian Refugees Were Welcomed With Open Arms. Now They’re Being Made Homeless.

When Vladimir Putin ordered the invasion of Ukraine one year ago, it created the largest refugee crisis in Europe since World War Two and prompted an outpouring of support for over 5 million displaced Ukrainians. 

After some initial dithering, the UK government introduced the Homes for Ukraine scheme that allowed refugees to live with volunteer ‘sponsors’ across the country for a minimum of six months. Keen to help, the public signed up in their thousands.

Now households are facing spiralling energy and food prices, and sponsorship arrangements are wrapping up as a result. According to data from the Department for Levelling Up, over 4,000 Ukrainian households in the UK have needed homelessness support. 

Among them is Nadia Grin, who spoke to VICE World News from inside a hotel she is being housed in in Hastings, on the south coast of England, along with her 5-year-old son. Her room is small and dotted with the clothing she managed to take from her home in Kyiv at the onset of the war.

They have been here since the 1st of February after their sponsorship arrangement ended – she spoke well of the couple that had hosted them and said it had been pre-arranged they would only stay for 6 months. 

Once homeless, refugees are the responsibility of UK councils, many of which are already overstretched.

Grin, 50, is grateful for the room but it is far from ideal. “I think my son is missing out. The space in the room is very tiny… what a child wants is room to play and run around, but there is no space in the hotel for him to even lay out his toys,” she said, speaking to VICE World News over video call via an interpreter. 

“I hope our situation is temporary and not permanent.” 

Grin receives universal credit, as well as child support, which adds up to £667 a month. She does not receive housing support (this is capped at £384.62 a week for single parents outside London), but she pays £27 a week to stay at the hotel. She is keen to find a job as an accountant or book-keeper but says the language barrier has made finding work tough. 

“On paper, lots of positions are available but in practical terms for some reason Ukrainians can’t get hold of the jobs they’d like. The majority of Ukrainians in Hastings are unemployed, and I’m one of them,” she said.

Across the country there are many examples of refugees living in a similar situation to Grin and her son. A large number are single parents – United Nations statistics from the early days of the invasion showed that 83 percent of Ukrainian refugee women were travelling with at least one child. 

In Northamptonshire, Mariia, 34, whose surname has been withheld for the safety of her relatives, is being housed in a hotel with her 6 year old son. Her husband is currently fighting in Ukraine – a common situation for refugees with spouses and relatives of military age. 

She and her child had lived with sponsors for 6 months and she said both parties agreed it was best if they left, saying that both had had “enough” without going into details. 

“We are not outside in the cold,” Mariia said. But she also misses having access to a washing machine and kitchen. Her son, running around the room during the school holiday period, is also not allowed to have friends over. 

Despite a lack of permanent housing, Mariia spoke warmly about people in the UK saying when she arrived “everyone was very friendly, even now I understand people want to help us but some of them have no opportunity to help us as much as we need – that’s why we’re in a hotel.”

Someone who can offer a sense of the scale of the crisis is Irina Bormotova, who provides employment advice to Ukrainian refugees at the Groundwork refugee hub in West London.

Bormotova says that although some sponsors might offer extensions to Ukrainians, the inevitable tension of living in each other’s pockets can become too intense for some.

Every week she sees more Ukrainians with fears about accommodation and also hears how relationships with hosts can break down. She mentions a case of a family with three kids who found themselves homeless after a row with their host in relation to their energy use. 

“I had a phone call in the middle of lunch, a lady called me saying: ‘We’ve been asked to leave… one of the kids was using too much electricity… so they had a big argument with the host and they left.”

Bormotova said the family in question ended up in a hotel in a different council, but were told they could only stay the one night.  

The family was eventually moved to temporary accommodation in Kent. 

Other case workers have also described the soaring cost of bills as a growing point of friction between refugees and sponsors.

“There are sponsors who realise it’s not for them, there are too many expenses. We do have conflicts because people come from different backgrounds, there can be misunderstandings.” said Bormotova. “People realise it’s just too much to handle, it’s nothing personal,” she added. 

In response to the growing issue of homelessness among Ukrainians, the government announced an increase in minimum ‘thank you’ payments to sponsors from £350 to £500 a month if their guest has been in the country for more than 12 months. Although inevitably stories about bust-ups emerge, some Ukrainians have also spoken about how those hosting them have become like family.

Many are keen to be independent but in trying to access rented accommodation they are being met with impossible financial barriers in what is an already overcrowded market.  

Derek Edwards is the co-founder of Nadiya, an organisation that matches refugees with sponsors. He is working on a self-funded housing programme designed to try and get Ukrainian refugees into long-term private accommodation. 

He is blunt about the issue of homelessness among Ukrainian refugees

“It’s fucking dire… I can’t knock the financial package that Ukrainians get when they get into the country, it’s just a shame that we didn’t foresee (or we did foresee and ignored) the coming storm that was the homelessness crisis.” 

The growing number of homeless Ukrainians being housed in hotels he dubs as a looming “Afghan problem” in which families spend years on end in temporary housing. “I think that the Ukrainian crisis is going in exactly the same direction, simply because there isn’t the housing stock and the barriers to get into the private renting sector,” Edwards says. 

The number of refugees entering the country, although significantly less than at the start of the war, is showing no sign of ebbing with the total number of Ukraine scheme visa applications increasing each month. The threat of Russia’s planned spring offensive also remains. 

“It will pick up again and there’s going to be significant numbers of people looking for homes throughout Europe,” said Edwards. “And there’s fatigue. You’ve got fatigue throughout all these countries.” 

In her hotel room in Northamptonshire, Mariia reflects on an uncertain future and a war with no clear end in sight. 

“It’s too dangerous to go back,” she says. “We have a strange neighbour, a terrorist neighbour called Russia. I have discussed our next step with my husband and I understand that the future for our son will be better here. All my heart and being is in Ukraine. I want to go back, it is my motherland, but until the war finishes we will stay here.”