“Problems at Border Points: Refugee Evacuation from Ukraine Hindered in Estonia and Latvia”

Volunteer organizations involved in the export of refugees from Ukraine claim that in recent months, problems have become more frequent when trying to pass the border points with Estonia and Latvia, the BBC Russian Service reports.

First of all, we are talking about those refugees who are trying to be evacuated to Europe through the territory of Russia and Belarus due to the inaccessibility of other safe export corridors, as well as those citizens of Ukraine who, for some reason, were in Russia before the war, and now trying to leave.

The last incident occurred the day before, on May 6. A citizen of Ukraine born in 1991 was refused entry to Latvia at the Urbany-Silene checkpoint. The man was also denied an attempt to request political asylum and to record an application for international protection.

At the same time, this Ukrainian cannot return to Belarus either. There he was issued a ban on entry. The man has been in the neutral zone for more than a day.

“We have been sounding the alarm about Estonian checkpoints for a long time. Recently, many problems have arisen at the Urbany-Silene checkpoint, on the border of Latvia and Belarus. This is a systemic problem, with which it is not clear what can be done: European structures have been ignoring the problem of not letting some Ukrainians through for a very long time,” – told the BBC BBC representatives of one of the volunteer organizations (the name of the organization and the name of its representative are not given for security reasons).

According to volunteers, one of the main problems of the current situation is the lack of transparency of the refusal mechanism: the documents provided to refuseniks do not indicate the grounds for refusing entry.