Germany Boots Out Scores of Afghans Amid Influx of Ukrainian Refugees, Report Says

Last month, German Interior Minister Nancy Faeser said refugees from Ukraine would not need to go through regular asylum procedures, and that they will receive immediate protection for up to three years in the EU.

Germany has evicted hundreds of Afghans who fled the Taliban “as an even larger flood of Ukrainian refugees” is arriving in the country amid Russia’s ongoing special military operation in Ukraine

That is according to a report by the US magazine Foreign Policy, which claimed that the eviction decision was made by Berlin’s Senate Department for Integration, Labour, and Social Services.

The department insisted the move was “based on operationally necessary and difficult considerations” with no alternative as Ukrainian refugees, among them scores of women with children, needed accommodation.

Foreign Policy quoted Tareq Alaows, a board member of the Berlin Refugee Council, as saying that “the evictions [of Afghans] purposefully were not publicised”.

“Some [Afghan] people had lived in their homes for years and were ripped out of their social structures, including children who were moved to locations far from their respective schools”, Alaows pointed out.

The German government typically grants asylum seekers temporary residence, which is re-evaluated every six months. But most Afghans evacuated since August 2021 when the Taliban captured Kabul skipped this process entirely, immediately receiving three-year residency permits.

An unnamed social worker told Foreign Policy that meant that “soon after their arrival, Afghans fell into the same category — and are treated — as asylum-seekers who have been granted asylum and who have already been living in Germany for years, able to speak the language and to navigate the system”.

The report came after Pavel Shefernaker, Polish deputy Interior and Administration Minister, said in mid-March that Berlin had asked Warsaw to stop sending special trains of Ukrainian refugees as Germany could not process the influx of people.

"The German Federal Ministry of the Interior contacted us last night, asking if we could suspend the special trains to Germany, because of a ‘chokepoint’ which occurred there”, Shefernaker told the Polish broadcaster TVN.

The UN High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR) said earlier this week that a total of 5.01 million Ukrainians had left their country since the beginning of the ongoing Russian special operation in Ukraine in late February. According to the German Interior Ministry, almost 300,000 refugees from Ukraine have been registered in the country as of the beginning of this month.

The Russian special operation to demilitarise and de-Nazify Ukraine, which was announced by President Vladimir Putin on 24 February, has entered its second stage and aims to liberate Donbass from Ukrainian forces. The Russian Defence Ministry has repeatedly stressed that the operation only targets Ukraine’s military infrastructure with high-precision weapons.