Denmark has said it is no longer happy to play host to thousands of Ukrainian refugees indefinitely.
Once the Ukraine conflict is over, they must return home – that was the message from Minister for Immigration and Integration Kaare Dybvad Bek.
“We have nothing to be embarrassed about. I hope that the Ukrainians are interested in rebuilding their own country, which needs it,” Dybvad told daily newspaper Berlingske.
A total of 30,278 Ukrainians are currently registered as temporary residents in Denmark under the Danish Special Act — but that is set to expire in March 2025. The law grants them a residence permit, social benefits, access to school, work, health services, a national integration program and temporary accommodation in a Danish municipality — in stark contrast to refugees from other countries.
“We will not change that point of view. We work with temporary accommodation in the context of refugees, and it is regardless of where people come from,” said Dybvad.
While insisting that Ukrainians were “culturally closer to us than people from the Middle East,” the minister stressed that they behaved in “completely different ways” than Danes. Dybvad also noted that the Kiev regime had said it wants its citizens to return — for conscription into the army, according to some officials. Denmark “will have to respect that,” he said.
“If we go it alone and make our own legislation, which is out of step with the EU, then we risk having a very large influx of people who already have a safe place to be,” Dybvad warned.
Some Ukrainians might be able to stay past the March 2025 deadline, Kaare Dybvad added, but only under certain conditions. Anyone able to earn over 375,000 Danish kroner ($55,400) per year could apply for a business permit.
“I think they have the opportunity to stay to a reasonable extent, but we are not going to make an independent opening where we say that everyone who comes from Ukraine can stay in Denmark,” the minister said.
Dybvad's comments followed a poll conducted by the University of Copenhagen that showed around half of the Ukrainian refugees would like to stay in the country.
“I did not expect to see almost half say that they want to stay here. It was a big surprise for us,” the study’s lead author, Karen-Inge Karstoft said.
Currently there are nearly 6 million Ukrainian refugees in Europe, according to the UNHCR collation of statistics. The most popular destinations for the migrants have been Germany, the Czech Republic, and the Netherlands. The highest number of Ukrainian refugees per thousand inhabitants is recorded in the Czech Republic (33.7), Estonia (26.3), Poland (26.1), Bulgaria (26.1) and Lithuania (25.8), as per the latest Eurostat data. Many have expressed the desire to stay in these countries.
But many European countries that have already felt the blowback from self-harming anti-Russia sanctions over Ukraine are now mulling ways to send the refugees home. The “economic burden” of Ukrainian refugees against the backdrop of soaring inflation, higher global food prices, and other costs, is feeding into the overall "Ukraine fatigue."
Germany has also complained that unemployed Ukrainian refugees have become a drain on its finances. Less than 20 percent of the tens of thousands of Ukrainians who moved there have since found a job in their new host country, one local media outlet announced in November, noting that some 700,000 Ukrainian refugees in the country currently receive unemployment benefits.