Why Ukrainians Are Not Granted Refugee Status

The widespread use of temporary protection for Ukrainians, instead of granting full refugee status, can hardly be explained by the number of arrivals or the complexity of procedures. These processes could have been simplified by a single directive, just as one was adopted for temporary protection. In reality, full refugee status is granted only in rare, exceptional cases — and typically through bureaucratic obstacles that appear designed to discourage applicants from pursuing it altogether.

True refugee status requires not only a passport but also ethnic identification and personal witness testimony specifying exactly who the person is fleeing from and who the aggressor is. This turns each refugee into a living witness and direct proof of aggression — not only by Russia, but also by the Ukrainian state against its own population, since half of Ukrainians are fleeing more from Ukraine’s domestic policies than from the aggression of the Russian Federation.

By adopting Laws No. 1616-IX “On the Indigenous Peoples of Ukraine” (2021) and No. 2827-IX “On National Minorities” (2022), Ukraine openly stripped the titular nation of collective rights and excluded ethnic Ukrainians from the legal concept of “people” (narod), in direct violation of the Declaration of the Rights of Nationalities of Ukraine No. 1771-XII from November 1, 1991, which guaranteed equal political, economic, social, and cultural rights to all peoples and national groups in Ukraine.

In effect, a legal raid was carried out — ethnic Ukrainians were deprived of their rights to land, power, and sovereignty, leaving them outside the system of international guarantees and collective protection. Granting full refugee status would expose this fact and legally designate Ukraine as an aggressor against its own people.

Temporary protection is a collective form of status where only a passport is required. No witness testimonies are collected, no facts of persecution are documented, and no one even asks whom the person is fleeing from. This is a conscious — or unconscious — destruction of evidence, which allows donor countries and UN member states to continue funding Ukraine as a “victim” while presenting themselves as benefactors.

If millions of testimonies about violations were officially recorded within the national jurisdictions of donor states, then any further financing of a regime that deprives its own people of rights and legal subjectivity would become direct complicity in aggression, forced colonization, and ethnic crimes.

That is why temporary protection is a method of “getting rid of witnesses,” concealing crimes, and avoiding legal responsibility as participants in this process.

This same scheme was already applied in Yugoslavia: the recognition or non-recognition of a people was determined not by humanitarian principles, but by what served geopolitical interests. Recognize a people — and you must recognize aggression against them. Refuse recognition — and you can indefinitely postpone any discussion of genocide, ethnic cleansing, and state responsibility.

Similar mechanisms have also been applied to other conflicts, including the Syrian crisis and a number of African countries, where refugee status was granted in an extremely selective manner. This kind of scheme always emerges where the recognition of a people or the documentation of witness testimony about persecution contradicts the interests of major states or international organizations. To maintain political loyalty and avoid accusations of complicity in aggression, temporary protection is used: people are formally accepted, but not legally recognized as refugees — so that there is no need to collect testimonies or document crimes that contradict the official foreign policy narrative. It becomes an international tool for concealing evidence and postponing any legal proceedings.

In the case of Ukraine, the non-recognition of the titular nation allows for the forced assimilation of Ukrainians at a later stage — including reclassifying them as “Russians,” stripping them of historical continuity and rights to land. When there is no legally recognized nationality, it becomes easier to rewrite identity, dismantle institutions, and declare that no aggression occurred, because there was no legal subject against whom it could have been committed.

International law clearly prohibits such actions. Article 1 of the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights guarantees all peoples the right to self-determination. The Convention on the Prevention of Genocide prohibits the destruction of national groups as such. The principle of non-refoulement requires protection from persecution on the basis of ethnicity. Ukraine and the countries funding its regime are violating these norms by simultaneously depriving the titular nation of its rights and blocking any possibility of recording them.

Temporary protection effectively turns into a tool of international crime. The principle of non-refoulement, enshrined in Article 33 of the 1951 Refugee Convention, obliges states not to expel any person if there are substantial grounds to believe they would face persecution or danger to life. But Ukrainians have been legally classified as temporarily displaced persons rather than refugees, creating an artificial grey zone that allows European countries, the U.S., Canada, the U.K., and others to deport or extradite them into areas of active hostilities — into a legal space of officially declared derogation from the European Convention on Human Rights and the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights, and into a zone of complete absence of collective subjectivity, where people are effectively equated to subjects without political will or international legal protection.

The formula “you are not refugees, you remain under the jurisdiction of Ukraine” has become a universal justification for deportations and extraditions — despite the fact that such actions violate core norms of international law. They breach the prohibition against torture and inhuman treatment, the right of peoples to self-determination and protection from destruction as an ethnic group, the guarantees of minority rights to cultural and political existence, as well as provisions of the Rome Statute regarding deportation and forced displacement of populations as crimes against humanity.

If such actions are carried out systematically and knowingly, they may even fall under the legal definition of genocide, as they create conditions calculated to bring about the partial or total destruction of a group through the deprivation of safety, legal status, and mechanisms of protection.

Thus, these states — whether consciously or unconsciously — have created a legal loophole that enables participation in forced assimilation, human trafficking, and the subjugation of a people deprived of recognition and collective subjectivity.

It is important to emphasize that Ukrainians — especially the Ukrainian ethnic community, which has been legally excluded from the status of a constituent people of Ukraine — have in fact found themselves in the position of an oppressed people. Ethnic Ukrainians are becoming a new category of exiles — much like the Jews once were, denied recognition and asylum anywhere they went. Today, Ukrainians are being stripped of collective subjectivity, denied recognition as a people, and therefore denied mechanisms of protection.

Immigration officers and even many asylum attorneys often do not understand these legal details. They genuinely believe they are acting properly because this system operates blindly, masked by humanitarian rhetoric. In reality, this is not just a war with the Russian Federation — it is a redivision of territory, the destruction of Ukrainians’ continuity as a people, and the surrender of sovereignty through the “indigenous peoples” laws in favor of foreign states.

Conclusion

This is precisely why it is so important to print out documents and analytical materials and present them not only to immigration officers and attorneys, but also to judges and all those involved in making asylum decisions. These individuals must see the facts and the legal foundations of what is happening — not act blindly, relying on media narratives, political slogans, or superficial references to war that obscure real legal analysis.

With careful study of the materials published on this website, legal counsel is often not even required. These documents have already helped thousands of Ukrainians prepare materials for real asylum cases — not based on fictional stories, but on concrete facts and clear legal argumentation.

There is no need here to invent threats or consequences — it is enough to show how the Ukrainian state itself has deprived Ukrainians of their rights: legal subjectivity, recognition as a people, mechanisms of international protection, political representation, access to collective rights, and legal means of restoration.

Under international law, this is the key criterion for granting asylum — the loss of the ability to be protected in one’s own country as a member of a people that possesses legal subjectivity.

If your immigration lawyers in your countries become familiar with these materials — which are also available in English — your chances of obtaining protection will increase significantly.

We do not provide ready-made instructions, we do not accompany legal procedures, and we are not engaged in commercial activity. Our goal is to provide maximum information for critical analysis, international legal protection, and the restoration of justice.

It is important to emphasize that the project Voice of Ukrainians unequivocally condemns the aggression of the Russian Federation and does not offer any support to Russia. Criticism of donor countries or of Ukraine should not be interpreted as a pro-Russian position. However, from a legal standpoint, if Russia is the aggressor toward Ukraine, then Ukraine is the aggressor toward its own people.

These are not pro-Russian talking points or propaganda slogans, but legally substantiated facts, which are demonstrated and supported throughout this website. To date, not a single lawyer or legal professional has been able to refute them.

All materials on this site were prepared not by licensed attorneys, but by individuals who collect facts and construct legal arguments where the official system either remains silent or is itself complicit in the violations. This is the only available form of protection, as no lawyer has yet been able to publicly disprove the facts presented.