Britain's response to Ukrainian refugees: irresponsible

Thursday 26 February 2026

Britain’s Ukraine policy now contains a quiet contradiction — and it matters because it is being lived, in real time, by families who believed that “asylum” meant protection from a war that has no safe rear.

On paper, the United Kingdom continues to present herself as a leading supporter of Ukraine. She has funded air defence, trained troops, sanctioned Russian elites and opened visa routes for Ukrainians who can find a sponsor or meet scheme criteria Yet, in parallel the United Kingdom Home Office has moved towards refusing a growing share of asylum claims by Ukrainians on the premise that return is feasible because internal relocation remains possible — particularly to Kyiv and western regions that are described, in official guidance, as “in general safe”. 

This is not an abstract dispute about bureaucratic phrasing. It is the difference between a state recognising that a country at war can still produce individual refugees and a state insisting that a separate set of visa categories should substitute for the Refugee Convention. The practical effect is stark — lawyers and journalists have reported a sharp shift from high rates of protection to widespread refusals, with refusal letters explicitly invoking “safe areas” and internal relocation. 

The moral question is equally stark — can any part of Ukraine now be treated as safe in the way “safe” is used in asylum decision-making, when Russia’s long-range strike complex has evolved to reach, with lethal effect, cities far from the front?

The Home Office logic: protection by geography

The Home Office’s public-facing position tends to emphasise case-by-case assessment. The machinery beneath that reassurance is the Country Policy and Information Note (CPIN) system — guidance used by decision-makers to assess risk, relocation and humanitarian conditions. In January 2025 the CPIN on the humanitarian situation argued that Ukraine’s conditions were not, in general, so severe as to engage the high threshold of inhuman or degrading treatment, while the same document pointed to Kyiv and western oblasts as areas where a person could, in general, internally relocate. 

If one assumes two propositions, the approach has an internal coherence:

• Russia’s war produces zones of high danger near the front and zones of materially lower danger elsewhere

• “Lower danger” can satisfy the legal test for internal relocation, provided an individual can access basic services and is not individually targeted

Those propositions might once have felt plausible, at least to officials reading maps and casualty distributions. They are becoming less plausible as Russia’s ability to project violence across the whole of Ukraine improves, and as the character of the air war shifts from episodic strikes to persistent pressure.

The air war has changed: range, density and adaptation

It is now routine for Russia to strike far beyond the front line with cruise missiles, ballistic missiles and one-way attack drones — and to do so in combinations intended to saturate Ukrainian air defence. Analysts tracking the air war have described continuous tactical adaptation — modifications to missile profiles, changes in flight patterns, electronic countermeasures and a widening repertoire of systems. 

The consequence is not merely that any given strike can reach western Ukraine — that has been true, in some measure, since early 2022. The deeper point is that the risk landscape has become more evenly distributed because the attacker’s reach is increasingly divorced from territorial proximity. When a state can launch large numbers of loitering munitions night after night, and mix them with missiles designed to complicate interception, “distance from the front” ceases to function as a reliable proxy for safety. 

The November 2025 strike on Ternopil is an emblem of this change. Monitoring by the Office of the United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights recorded that long-range weapons in November caused a majority share of civilian casualties and noted that the 19 November attack on Ternopil killed at least 38 civilians — the deadliest single verified incident in more than two years — in a western city far from the main combat zone. That is what it looks like when the rear is no longer reliably rear.

UNHCR, the United Nations refugee agency, has publicly warned against treating western Ukraine as a basis for refusing protection, stating that deadly attacks in western Ukraine are a reminder that no part of the country is safe and that states should not refuse protection or assistance on the assumption that return is safe. 

This is the factual hinge on which Britain’s policy now swings. The Home Office guidance says, in general, internal relocation to Kyiv and western oblasts is possible. The United Nations refugee agency says no part of the country should be considered safe in the manner implied by that reasoning. 

When policy language meets human beings

The cruelty of an administrative decision is often accidental — a by-product of templates and thresholds — but it is cruelty all the same. Recent reporting describes refusal letters telling families that they can relocate to the west of Ukraine or Kyiv, even while acknowledging the reality of the war and fears of persecution, with families describing the practical terror of returning under bombardment. Earlier reporting described a wider trend of refusals justified on “safe to return” reasoning and noted the extremely low numbers granted refugee status or humanitarian protection compared with the scale of need. 

There is also a structural feature of Britain’s response that encourages this outcome. The Home Office can point to bespoke Ukraine routes — particularly the Homes for Ukraine Sponsorship Scheme and related permissions — as the appropriate mechanism for Ukrainians to remain. Those routes are real and have helped many. But they are not asylum.

Asylum is not a migration convenience for people who missed a visa window. It is the legal recognition that a person cannot be required, in safety and dignity, to rely upon her own state’s protection, and cannot reasonably be expected to survive by moving to a different postcode inside a country under long-range attack.

Temporary permission schemes and asylum also differ in what they mean psychologically. A family can build a life on refugee status — work, study and plan — in a way that is harder on rolling, politically contingent permissions. The point of refugee protection is not only physical survival. It is a stable legal identity, granted because the danger is not a matter of personal choice.

The legal and ethical problem: “general safety” in an era of long-range terror

Internal relocation is a legitimate concept in refugee law, but it was never meant to become a convenient fiction. To be lawful and ethical, it must rest on reality — and reality must be updated as wars evolve.

The Home Office’s own materials acknowledge, in other contexts, that conflict situations are fluid and decision-makers must consider up-to-date information. The difficulty is that “up to date” is not simply a matter of adding new casualty figures to an annex. In a missile and drone campaign, the change is qualitative.

A person might once have been advised — by friends, by aid organisations, even by common sense — to move west when the east became unbearable. That advice presupposed that the west was not routinely reachable in the same way, at the same scale, by the attacker. The attack on Ternopil and the broader pattern of long-range strikes in the west of Ukraine undermines that presupposition. 

Nor is the risk only the risk of death. Living under persistent air raids, in a society whose electricity, heating and public services are repeatedly targeted, imposes a burden that interacts with vulnerability — disability, trauma, children’s health, single parenthood, prior persecution, risk of forced mobilisation, risk of exploitation during displacement. A policy that treats “western oblasts” as a single safe category invites decision-makers to smooth those variables away.

Britain’s political incentive — and its moral cost

There is a reason this hardening of asylum decisions is happening now. Britain’s asylum system is under political strain, with ministers publicly judged on “backlogs” and hotel numbers. The broader trend has been towards faster decisions and a tougher posture. In such an environment Ukrainians can become collateral damage of a narrative in which “safe return” and “alternative routes” are used to keep protection numbers low.

But that is precisely why Ukraine matters as a test case. A state that cannot maintain moral clarity about asylum for a European country facing a highly visible campaign of aerial terror is signalling something bleak about her future choices when the next crisis is less photographed and more easily ignored.

What a responsible policy would look like

Britain does not have to choose between border control and decency. She does have to choose between honest risk assessment and the comfort of outdated assumptions.

A responsible approach would involve three shifts.

First, update the internal relocation premise. If the United Nations refugee agency states that no part of Ukraine is safe in the relevant sense, that position cannot simply be footnoted and ignored. The Home Office can still assess individual claims, but it should stop treating geography as a near-dispositive answer.

Second, recognise that visa schemes are not a substitute for asylum. Routes such as Homes for Ukraine are valuable, but they are discretionary designs of domestic policy.  Refugee protection is a binding commitment in international law. A person should not be denied refugee status because she did not, or could not, secure a sponsor.

Third, build a doctrine of dignity for war-displaced Europeans that acknowledges modern air power. Russia’s capacity to strike across Ukraine is not an embarrassing detail. It is a central feature of how she now wages war — and it collapses the old distinction between “front” and “rear”. 

The issue is not whether Ukrainians are resilient — they are. The issue is whether Britain wishes her asylum policy to be anchored to the lived reality of a war that has evolved, or to a comforting map in which danger stays politely in its lane.

Because when long-range weapons make the whole country reachable, the phrase “generally safe” becomes less a finding of fact than a decision of convenience — and convenience is not, and should never become, the measure of refuge.

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The author is a British citizen living in Ukraine who is willing and able to provide expert evidence to British authorities about the living conditions in different parts of contemporary wartime Ukraine. lvivherald@gmail.com