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Evening Standard
Evening Standard
Entertainment
Katie Strick

A maze of red tape, data losses and visa bottlenecks — inside the UK’s Homes for Ukraine fiasco

Elsa De Jager, 37, can think of little else. Like millions across the world, the hotel director and her partner Angus Collins were horrified by Vladimir Putin’s reign of terror on innocent Ukrainian people and wanted to help, so they signed up to host a refugee at their spacious home in Wandsworth.

They registered for the Government’s Homes for Ukraine sponsorship scheme on the day it opened (March 18) and signed up to a Facebook group which pairs hosts with refugees, matching with an English teacher called Yana, 32, and her daughter Alisa, four, who are currently terrified and hiding in a bomb shelter in western Ukraine.

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