“Bulgaria takes the best care of its refugees out of the entire EU… and from day one they were put up at hotels… it is just that the financing ran out,” caretaker Minister of Tourism Ilin Dimitrov said at the end of last week in an interview with public service TV BNT.  A couple of days ago the caretaker cabinet took the decision to stop the accommodation of Ukrainian refugees at private hotels and to transfer them to state-run facilities instead. The humanitarian aid programme for the people fleeing the war was extended for the second time, at the last possible moment. In the words of Interior Minister in the caretaker cabinet Ivan Demerdzhiev, it will be applied until the beginning of 2023, after which “parliament ought to find a lasting solution to the matter”. 

The Ukrainians, currently put up at hotels, were given a grace period to leave them – until 15 November. And, once again, they will be transferred, with all the confusion and chaos that that entails. Owners of hotels on the Black Sea coast came out to protest in defence of the refugees accommodated at their hotels, and some of the Ukrainians started leaving for Constanța in Romania, where a state programme is in place up until June.

• Bulgaria extends accommodation program for Ukrainian refugees

“Bulgaria has no long-term strategy for assisting and accommodating these people, and that makes things extremely uncertain for them,” says Rositsa Atanasova who is a lawyer with the Foundation for Access to Rights.

“It was clear from day one that accommodating them at hotels is a crisis measure what cannot endure. Since the beginning of the war the deadline of the humanitarian programme has been extended twice, and the decision what would happen after 1 November was made at the last minute, leaving these people in the dark as to what is going to happen to them. Moving them around does absolutely nothing for their integration. Even if they have established some kind of contacts within the community, even if their children have started going to school or they have found a job, a forced new beginning means they would have to start all over again. There are absolutely no stage-by-stage measures that would stimulate them to lead an independent life in Bulgaria. And so they are faced with a very difficult choice – either to cope all by themselves, and some have chosen to do that, or to remain fully dependent on the state.”

Rositsa Atanasova goes on to explain that by law, refugees with a temporary protection status are entitled to preliminary information, in written form, about the conditions the host country is offering them, and about the deadlines. “No such information has been given them in any form,” she says.

“Refugees cannot be treated like objects. They are mostly mothers with children, elderly people, disabled people,” Tatiana Christy from the Open Heart foundation, who has been helping the people running from the war for months, said for the BNR. She expressed doubts as to how adequate the living conditions at the facilities in question are, especially during the coming winter months.

“We have provided state-run and municipal facilities that are suitable for winter conditions,” said on his part Konstantin Botev, expert at the Tourist Policy directorate of the Ministry of Tourism and member of the inter-departmental group tasked with making the decisions that concern the refugees from Ukraine. “There will be food there, heating and electricity,” he added. “They are all over the country. The transfer is planned for the period from 1 to 15 November. I have no information about any accommodation in trailers.”

But the trailers are definitely there and Ukrainian refugees are being put up in them, and that triggered a massive public debate. 35 Ukrainian refugees, 12 of whom children have already been put up at the closed temporary accommodation buffer centre in Elhovo. They arrived in Bulgaria a few days ago from Zaporizhzhia, and will remain at the camp until they can be provided accommodation at state-run facilities, Yambol’s regional governor Georgi Chalakov said for the BNR. 

“Hotels cannot provide integration,” said Democratic Bulgaria MP Kremena Kuneva who is cofounder of the For the Good foundation. “At this point, eight months on, we have not even determined these people’s status – which ones are needy, which ones are elderly, which ones have different diseases, which ones are mothers of small children and cannot take a job. These are things we don’t know. We hand out the same things to them all, and this is hindering their integration. We do everything piecemeal, at the last possible moment,” Kremena Kuneva says.

Rositsa Atanasova sees a solution to this tangle of problems in the formation of an inter-departmental commission to focus solely on the problems of the refugees from Ukraine.

“A functioning long-term strategy for helping them needs to be developed. The approach must be more humanitarian, more comprehensive and it must include our legal obligations, under both national and European law, instead of waiting for the predictable deadlines, and then, in a panic, transferring the people somewhere else. That is the absolute minimum, and the country had the whole summer to put them in place.”

According to data of the state website Bulgaria for Ukraine, around 55,000 Ukrainian refugees have remained in the country since the start of the war, a little over 16,000 of them have been provided accommodation by the state. 

Interviews by Silvia Velikova, Lora Tarkoleva and Diana Yankulova, Horizont channel, BNR

Compiled and edited by Vessela Krasteva