Taoiseach cannot ‘envisage’ sending Ukrainians home before war ends

Taoiseach Leo Varadkar has said the Government could not “envisage” sending Ukrainian refugees back to Ukraine until the war with Russia was over.

Under a European Union-wide directive, Ukrainians fleeing the war have been entitled to emergency accommodation, access to the labour market, education and social welfare.

While the directive has been extended until March 2025, Mr Varadkar said the EU would need to agree on a way to continue to provide protection after that point. “I can’t envisage sending anyone back to Ukraine until it’s safe and anyone can see it is not safe ... I can’t envisage us being in a position to do that until the war is over,” he said.

More than 100,000 Ukrainians have come to the Republic since the Russian invasion of Ukraine in early 2022, with experts projecting the conflict to potentially last for at least several more years.

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Mr Varadkar said it was not possible to consider letting the directive offering Ukrainians protection in EU countries expire. “I would be of the view for as long as this war is raging the European Union should continue to allow people from Ukraine to take refuge in our countries,” he said.

“There are some parts of the country where the war is raging every day, there are other parts where they are subject to intermittent rocket attacks, but I don’t think it is true to say there is any part of Ukraine that is safe enough to go back to,” he said.

“About 20,000 of the people who came to Ireland from Ukraine have now either gone back to Ukraine or gone elsewhere, but that’s a very different thing to sending somebody back to Ukraine,” he said.

The Fine Gael leader said there needed to be a joint decision taken at EU level on the arrangements to continue to provide protection to Ukrainians. “A decision will have to be made on whether or not we extend the Temporary Protection Directive, I anticipate we will,” he said.

“What we want to do is to continue to act as a European Union, as 27 [member states], because what wouldn’t really work for anyone is having different countries [having] different rules in relation to Ukraine,” he said. “We should try to stick together as 27, if different countries start doing different things that will create all sorts of problems that are hard to anticipate,” he said.

Mr Varadkar was speaking to reporters in Pristina, the capital of Kosovo, after meeting the group of 13 Defence Forces troops stationed with the Nato-led peacekeeping mission in the west Balkan country. Earlier on Thursday he held separate meetings with Kosovo prime minister Albin Kurti and president Vjosa Osmani-Sadriu.

Later that evening he travelled to Montenegro to meet prime minister Milojko Spajić, before a meeting the country’s president Jakov Milatović on Friday morning. The final leg of the two-day visit to the west Balkans will see Mr Varadkar travel to Skopje in North Macedonia on Friday afternoon, to meet president Stevo Pendarovski and prime minister Dimitar Kovačevski.

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