It was when the airport in a neighbouring city was bombed that my aunt realised that the risks outweighed her hopes. She packed a single suitcase, left her home and her husband, and boarded a bus to Poland, with her two greatest treasures in tow: her two children. Her reason for living and her reason for leaving.
It feels absurd to say, but my aunt was incredibly lucky. Because she had visited us in the UK before and previously applied for a visa, she had everything from birth and marriage certificates to property paperwork already scanned and translated. Her husband, alone in their home, emailed everything over.
Ben Wallace, the defence secretary, stood by the UK’s decision to force Ukrainians to apply for visas — the only country in Europe to do so — by insisting the process is there simply to “check their identity” and that “it shouldn’t take time”.
Even with my aunt’s — let’s crudely call them “favourable” circumstances — the application took much more than time. It took days of paperwork co-ordination, a lot of favours, and a significant toll on every one of us.
But first, we had to wait. Under the Ukraine family scheme, siblings did not originally qualify as “immediate” family, so as the sister of a UK citizen, my aunt had to wait until the scheme for “extended” family opened on Tuesday.
The day before this “phase two” of the government’s “humanitarian support package” was to go live, I called the helpline to ask what time the application would become available. They didn’t know, but took my contact details and told me they would send an email as soon as the scheme went live the following day.
Having spent the next day refreshing the webpage since 8am, I know the application form appeared in the late afternoon.
But that promised email from UK Visas & Immigration? I received this four days after the form went live. Four days is a very long time when you’re fleeing war.
Once the application was live, I helped my family fill in the forms, plural — one for each applicant, including for my one-year-old cousin.
The form is also only available in English: a form specifically for Ukrainians was not translated into Ukrainian. I warmly invite anyone at the Home Office to, in an act of solidarity, try filling in a visa application form in Ukrainian.
Yet even as a native English speaker, the form includes some questions so absurd that even I was at a loss.
One asks what date the applicant plans to arrive in the UK. How can an applicant have a planned date of arrival when they are told in no uncertain terms that they cannot enter the UK without first securing a visa?
Priti Patel insists that the visa process is necessary in the interests of security and to prevent Russians with malicious intentions from entering the country. I had wondered how the visa form would prevent such abuses, and I soon found out: the application includes a yes/no question asking if applicants have been involved in war crimes, crimes against humanity, or genocide.
The application form itself is only the first hurdle. Applicants then have to book a biometrics appointment and upload evidence to a third-party website managed by TLScontact, whose parent company Teleperformance has won many a government contract.
The Ukraine Family Scheme is, as the home secretary proudly reiterates, free.
But the TLScontact portal also includes a menu of deluxe services, including a “priority” and “super priority” service, each with an equally luxurious price tag to match.
The relevant free option is at the bottom of the list and allows you to book an appointment, often weeks away, and upload your supporting documents which must be translated into English and cannot be amended or added to once submitted.
I managed to secure free legal advice from an immigration lawyer who was incredibly generous with her time, and without whom my family’s applications would have been, I now realise, much, much weaker. This lawyer congratulated me on correctly guessing each step of the — again, English-language only — appointment platform; most people don’t.
And now, again, we wait: this time for the biometrics appointments, which we didn’t dare risk cancelling even with the option from tomorrow to have these in the UK, and which have fallen on different days: my aunt’s one day, her children’s on another.
My dad has been in Poland for two weeks now, providing his sister, niece and nephew with moral, logistical and financial support. This also means that, as the breadwinner of our household here in the UK, he has not been able to work for two weeks. And yet we’re acutely aware that, comparatively, we’ve been very fortunate.
My family had language support, legal advice, a hoard of translated documents to hand and, above all else, were safe, with a support network. And even then, the process has been a minefield.
In the same way that my family members became refugees overnight, I had to try and become an ad hoc immigration adviser in the space of a few days, and family who remained in Ukraine had to help us secure certified translations for the few documents we only had in the original Cyrillic — in a country at war.
How shellshocked and profoundly traumatised Ukrainians without these legal, linguistic or financial means are supposed to navigate a constantly changing but relentlessly rigid process sounds like a rhetorical question, but is in fact the acute reality for thousands of refugees.
They have escaped a bloody hell, only to enter a bureaucratic purgatory.
Kateryna Pavlyuk is a Ukraine-born and London-bred documentary filmmaker, whose work centres on migration and community. She has directed and produced films for the arts & charity sectors, and worked with multiple NGOs and organisations advocating for migrant and refugee rights.