In the cold, dark basement of their bombed out apartment in Kharkiv, families huddle among the sewage pipes to keep warm. Two young girls, wearing thick coats and woolly hats, kneel in the dirt as they draw pictures of children beneath a bright yellow sun.
The children’s family are among a number of Ukrainians worried that their lives are being put at risk by the UK’s complex and lengthy visa application process.
On Wednesday, as Boris Johnson defended the government’s “overwhelmingly generous” record on refugees in the Commons, the Home Office revealed that just 2,700 visas have been issued under the Homes for Ukraine sponsorship scheme. Meanwhile, shells were falling near a makeshift bomb shelter in Kharkiv where several families are waiting for the UK to rubberstamp their path to safety.
“It’s constant bombing. Even in the blocks that are not bombed, there is no electricity. They have no water. There are no supplies. It is very scary for them,” said Tatyana Moskalenko, a Ukrainian who lives in the UK and is helping several families in Kharkiv navigate the UK visa process. “The majority of them have been spending weeks in a basement. They can’t get out of the house because it’s being constantly bombed.”
Dozens of Ukrainian refugees have contacted the Guardian to describe the difficulties they are enduring as they wait for UK visas to be granted. Some have been forced to remain in areas being attacked by Russian forces, others are struggling to find safe places to stay in the countries that border Ukraine.
In the UK thousands of potential hosts are increasingly worried by the delays. Some have expressed shame at having to explain to the refugees they are sponsoring that they will have to remain in a war zone until the visa is granted.
Moskalenko and her friend Kate Larmer have matched 62 Ukrainian families – including 92 children – with more than 100 people willing to open up their homes in the Surrey market town of Farnham. Yet despite submitting about 80 visa applications under the UK’s Homes for Ukraine scheme, only one has been approved. “These difficulties are putting families’ lives at risk,” said Larmer.
In Kyiv, university lecturer Maryna Rudina has her suitcase packed and waiting by the door of her flat, ready to leave as soon as visas are granted for her and her 14-year-old daughter Sofiia. She applied on 18 March and assumed the process would be swift. “It’s really terrifying here. There are sirens going off all the time, but it’s almost impossible to get to the shelter because we’re on the 24th floor. I’m checking my email every hour to see whether we’ve been sent the visas,” she said by telephone, adding that explosions had been audible just a few minutes earlier. “I feel my daughter’s life is in danger. We really need the visas to come very fast now.”
Philippa Cameron, a garden designer from Altrincham, Manchester, who has offered to host her, said she felt embarrassed at the delays. “We have daily contact but cannot reassure them as no one knows how long the visa approval will take,” she said.
Iryna Vasylchenko, a law graduate in the Kyiv suburb of Brovary, which came under heavy bombardment on Tuesday, said she had taken considerable risks just to fill in the UK application. The 39-year-old said: “To complete the visa, we have to leave the basement and risk our lives just to get somewhere with a connection. It took three days to complete. It’s a very, very laborious process.”
Vasylchenko, who works as an administrator in a beauty salon, said she was terrified it would take weeks to be approved: “We live in very difficult conditions. There is no food, there is no money.”
About 25,500 visas have been issued under the other government programme, the Ukraine Family scheme, since it was launched on 4 March, but relatives hoping to get family members to safety also said they were experiencing long delays. Nina Brown, who works for a hospice in Newport, said her 85-year-old mother, Nina Jolonko, had become so stressed after waiting three weeks for her UK visa to be granted, while staying in a school sports hall in Lublin in Poland, that she collapsed and had to be admitted to intensive care.
“The visa has been granted now, but she is still in the cardiology section of intensive care, so I don’t know how we will get her to the UK. She is normally a happy, active person – someone who survived bombings during the second world war, starvation under Stalin, and survived bombings in Kharkiv this month, but it was the stress of waiting for the British visa which made her ill,” she said. “She has traveled to the UK four times previously – we couldn’t understand why she was made to wait so long for a new visa. At the refugee shelter, she witnessed buses arrive from France, Germany, Spain and Italy to pick up refugees. There was nothing from Britain; they just felt abandoned.”
The Guardian has been told of numerous logistical and technical problems with the UK process. Filling in the forms can take three to four hours per person to complete – including for children – and must be submitted in English with all the correct documentation. Anyone without a Ukrainian international passport must apply for one or travel to a visa application centre in Poland, or farther afield, to submit biometrics data.
Lord Harrington, the refugees minister, said efforts were being made to streamline the system, and admitted that the process was “not as seamless as it should be”, but he was confident that 15,000 visas a week would soon be issued, and the backlog cleared. A government spokesperson said: “We continue to speed up visa processing across both schemes, with 25,500 visas issued in the last three weeks alone and thousands more expected to come through these uncapped routes.”
Many of those who have fled Ukraine are rapidly running out of money. Some are giving up and returning to their wartorn homeland, despite the danger.
Olha Hryhorchuk, 51, and her 78-year-old mother, Maria Haidychuk, decided to return to Ukraine days after applying in Rzeszów to travel to the UK. A farmer near Tunbridge Wells, Kent, has agreed to take them in under the Homes for Ukraine scheme but the two women could not afford to wait in Poland.
“They didn’t know how long the visa application was going to take. It could take a hell of a long time,” said Derek Edwards, a British businessman who has spent two weeks on the Polish border helping Ukrainians find refuge in the UK. He drove Hryhorchuk and her mother back to the Ukrainian border.
When they finally arrived in their home town after a nine hour journey by bus, Hryhorchuk text him to say they had arrived safely but there was “no light in the city, only a traffic light and my mother and I under the wall [sheltering] completely alone. It was very cold, dark and scary.”
Edwards, who runs a logistics firm, is helping another family who are contemplating trying to get back to Kharkiv rather than wait in Poland. He said: “The UK is being put to shame by the rest of Europe. This is simply inhumane.”
Nataliia Gaidur, a former finance director from Kyiv, said she was effectively homeless in Warsaw with her 10-year-old son Illia, waiting for a UK visa to be granted so they can travel to their sponsor’s home near Huddersfield. They have slept in four different places in 11 days, and do not know where they will be sleeping tomorrow night. “We didn’t make a plan B because we were promised help in Britain; we thought it would take just three or four days to get a visa,” she said. “We don’t have any money, Ukrainian bank cards don’t work here, and the person we’re staying with here can only have us for another night. We’re starting to lose hope.”
