A Privilege That can be Withdrawn: Ukrainian Refugee Women Between Welcome and its Limits

By Maria Grynevych

One of the women I interviewed – a stand-up performer who left Odesa for Berlin – described the German reception system with real admiration and then, in the same breath, declined it: “the financial support, of course, how the social system works – it is simply amazing… if you do the arithmetic, living on unemployment benefits is more advantageous than going to work yourself… I never requested that furniture allowance. I bought my own” (P19).[1]

That is not a complaint about the system but a refusal to occupy the position it offers her. She explains why later in the same interview: “we did not like being called refugees… we understood how there are people who left Mariupol and have nowhere left to return to… we were ashamed to call ourselves refugees.”

What does it mean to be at once the beneficiary of an exceptional protection regime and someone who feels that exception as a weight – something to be justified, measured against others’ losses, and where possible refused? The condition has a deliberately uncomfortable name: privileged refugeehood.

Context

The case is large. By December 2025 the UN’s refugee agency counted 5.86 million refugees from Ukraine worldwide. At the end of February 2026, 4.40 million held temporary protection in the European Union; Germany hosted 1,267,475, the largest share of any member state. Adult women were 43.5 percent of beneficiaries and minors a further 30.2 percent – demographically, a displacement of women and their children.[2]

The legal form of the welcome was as unusual as its scale. Rather than routing millions through individual asylum claims, the EU switched on its Temporary Protection Directive – a collective mechanism granting residence, work, education, health care and social support without asking each person to prove a case.[3] It was fast, humane and, by the standards of European asylum policy, remarkable.

The contrast with other arrivals was immediate. Many Syrians, Afghans, Iraqis and Africans fleeing comparable danger had met a different Europe: irregular routes, detention, pushbacks, long procedures, suspicion. And at the exits of this same war, non-white people trying to leave – African students, other third-country nationals, and Ukrainian Roma, citizens of the country under attack – were reported to face obstruction rather than open doors.[4]

This is where a much-used and much-abused word enters: privilege. In public debate it is rarely used precisely. It is turned against Ukrainians as an accusation – as in the German argument of 2025 for moving later arrivals off citizen’s benefit, which recast a protected group as a fiscal burden[5] – or rejected outright, as though naming unequal treatment would deny the suffering behind it. Imprecision here has moral costs.

So let me be exact. Women who fled bombardment, occupation and the loss of home are not privileged in any ordinary human sense. The privilege at issue is not existential ease but a relative reception advantage: a better legal and social starting position than other displaced people receive. It is produced rather than inherent, comparative rather than absolute, carried by institutions and public feeling alike – and it has a clock, since a welcome can cool as displacement drags on and yesterday’s guests are recast as today’s burden.

It also never applies evenly, following lines of nationality, race, class, gender and perceived “Europeanness”. The legal scholars Cathryn Costello and Michelle Foster note that “the global refugee regime treats different refugees differently, as a matter of course.”[6] Privileged refugeehood names a dominant frame, not a universal experience.

One objection deserves a direct answer. Ukrainians, it is said, were treated differently for practical reasons – visa-free entry, geographic proximity – not because they were seen as closer. That explains the choice of tool; it does not explain the pattern around it. The same governments that pleaded administrative necessity toward others framed Ukrainians as Europeans to be welcomed rather than arrivals to be managed.[7] Practicality made the generous response possible; perceived cultural proximity made it politically chosen.

How the study was done

The essay draws on 25 in-depth interviews conducted in 2023 and 2024, online, in Ukrainian or Russian, with women aged 20 to 59 who left Ukraine after 24 February 2022: women civically active before the war, women whose pre-war lives centred on family and profession, and – rare in this research – seven women who have since returned to Ukraine. I read them using grounded theory, coding line by line and letting recurring tensions organize the analysis.[8]

Two limits belong in plain sight. The women were reached through personal networks and are mostly skilled and middle-class, so the study cannot speak for those outside them, including Ukrainian Roma and third-country nationals; the caveat about uneven privilege applies to my own sample. And I am not a neutral outsider: I share the displacement I studied, which is what made access possible, and worked against its risks with a documented coding procedure and by anchoring every claim in the women’s own words.

What privilege feels like from inside

The enabling side is real. Temporary protection gave women a secure legal footing to start from – language courses, work, school for their children, volunteering – far sooner than asylum seekers caught in long procedures. “Since we arrived at the beginning of the war, there was a lot of help from volunteers,” one participant recalled (P07).

But the welcome came with a clock. “And then, after about four months, some neighbors started asking all the time when we would start working” (P07). Ukrainians had been publicly cast as deserving, European, hardworking and grateful, and the women describe the labour of matching it: anxiety about being judged for taking benefits, for not learning German fast enough, for not volunteering enough. Some took the expectation on as their own – “if I want to develop with them, then knowing their language is in fact a matter of respect… I felt a real desire to give a bit more of myself, of my skills, to German society” (P19). Others named its cost: what she needed, said P20, was “not to suffer from a constant feeling of guilt and lesser worth.” Women who are exhausted, isolated or simply ambivalent can feel they are failing an image pinned to their whole group. Recognition can empower and discipline at once.

P01, a sociologist who took courses and built local contacts before returning to Ukraine, caught that self-consciousness in one image: “I felt like I was constantly under a microscope. I realized it was mostly my own projection, but it was still psychologically uncomfortable.” The refused furniture allowance belongs to the same logic. Declining money she was legally owed drew a line between being helped and being dependent, and insisted the aid was really meant for people with nowhere to return to. The exception asks its beneficiaries to keep justifying themselves, and some answer by handing part of it back.

Legal advantage did not add up to belonging. Women could be housed, registered, enrolled, assisted – and still feel out of place. One participant tied the distance to time: “I can’t feel at home here yet, because I don’t know how long I am here” (P02). Not knowing how long is what a temporary status institutionalizes – belonging postponed by design.

Research on Ukrainian war migrants in France reaches a similar paradox from the side of work. Denys Gorbach, Yevheniia Polshchykova and Anastasiya Ryabchuk find that “what seems like Ukrainians’ privileged position turns into a handicap when you look at it closer”, because temporary protection offers no settled future in the country.[9] The comparison needs care: no migrant group in Europe today enjoys security, and forced removals rose sharply in 2025 in both Germany and France.[10] The claim is not that Ukrainians are worse off than other migrants, but that a status pegged to the duration of a war produces its own uncertainty – renewed by political decision, on a timetable its holders neither control nor can convert into permanence.

There was, finally, a price paid inside the Ukrainian community, and it came from two directions. From Ukrainians long settled in Germany came impatience: “There was pressure from Ukrainians who had lived there a long time … They didn’t understand why we couldn’t integrate quickly,” said P12, a violinist from Kherson. From Ukraine came a harder judgement: “people who went abroad were considered traitors” – a verdict passed by those who stayed, and one she met again on returning.

What complicated solidarity abroad was less social class in the strict sense than an asymmetry of settledness. Established migrants had years of local knowledge, stable work and housing; women who arrived in 2022 came with interrupted careers, children, few possessions and a dependence on welfare. A newcomer hosted by a settled migrant could feel protected and diminished in the same gesture. The asymmetry bore unevenly on the newcomers too: those with transferable qualifications, English and access to networks converted the German welcome into work quickly, while women without them stayed longer inside the reception system being praised on their behalf. The community that exists in Germany now – older migrants and post-2022 arrivals, each reshaped by the other – holds both solidarity and hierarchy.

A privilege that can be withdrawn

If privilege is produced rather than inherited, it can also be taken away – and recent German policy shows how. Draft legislation approved by the federal cabinet in November 2025, still in parliament, would move Ukrainians who arrived after 1 April 2025 from the higher citizen’s benefit to the lower asylum-seeker regime and out of statutory health insurance: roughly 455 euros a month for a single adult in place of 563.[11] That splits one national group by arrival date, mid-war.

If a cohort can be downgraded while the war continues, the privilege was never a property of the group; it was a position granted by law and public mood, revisable by the same forces. The point matters because public argument routinely treats “privileged” as a description of Ukrainians – something they are – when refugee law contains no such category and is formally universal. What exists is a practice of differentiation by states, and practices can be reversed. Nor does a favourable frame switch off older hierarchies: comparing Germany and the United States, Grit Grigoleit-Richter and Elen Fübbeker find gendered and racialized expectations still shaping access to protection and work in both.[12] That the pattern holds across two such different regimes suggests it is not a German peculiarity.

From exception to standard

Used carefully, privileged refugeehood points outward, not downward. The lesson of the Ukrainian reception is not that Ukrainians received too much – and the argument for that lesson is empirical before it is moral. The standing objection to generous refugee protection is that it cannot be done: too many people, too slow, too costly. In 2022 the European Union did it anyway, for more than four million people, within weeks, by activating a directive that had sat unused for two decades. That removes incapacity from the argument. What separated this response from the treatment of Syrians or Afghans was not administrative possibility but political will.

The same Europe has often pleaded incapacity or security when facing non-European refugees. In 2025 the gap was measurable within Germany alone: the asylum protection rate fell from 44 to 28 percent and family reunification for people with subsidiary protection was suspended for two years – while more than 1.3 million people who had fled Ukraine held a status granted collectively.[13] As one assessment of the Nordic reception puts it, the Ukrainian case “has shed light on the racism and hypocrisy of European migration policies.”[14]

So privileged refugeehood is not a way to rank suffering. It is a way to name unequal recognition – and the case for extending the Ukrainian standard rather than withdrawing it rests on two things. The first is capacity: Europe has shown that rapid collective protection is administratively possible, which makes its refusal elsewhere a decision rather than a constraint. The second is what the women report. Protection granted as a political favour is experienced as insecure even by those who receive it, and the November 2025 draft law suggests they are right. A discretionary welcome secures no one durably, including its beneficiaries. The women in this study live the tension before any scholar states it: gratitude and discomfort, recognition and loneliness, opportunity and guilt, experienced together. The task is not to narrow their rights, but to turn an exception into a standard.

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References:

[1]All interview quotations are drawn from the author’s doctoral research (2023–2024, unpublished): 25 semi-structured interviews with Ukrainian refugee women in Germany and returnees to Ukraine, conducted online in Ukrainian or Russian and translated by the author. Participants are identified by anonymized codes (P01, P02, …). The author’s own experience of displacement additionally informs the analysis through a separately published interview, cited as such rather than treated as interview data.

[2]UNHCR, Ukraine Situation: Overview for the Global Appeal 2026 (Geneva: UNHCR, December 2025); Eurostat, “Temporary Protection for 4.40 Million in February 2026,” news release, April 14, 2026. Figures for adult women (43.5 percent) and minors (30.2 percent) are from the Eurostat release.

[3]Council Implementing Decision (EU) 2022/382 of 4 March 2022, OJ L 71 (2022): 1–6, extended by Council Implementing Decision (EU) 2025/1460 of 15 July 2025.

[4]African Union, “Statement of the African Union on the Reported Ill Treatment of Africans Trying to Leave Ukraine,” press statement, February 28, 2022; Bolaji Balogun, “Refugees Separated by the Global Color Line: The Power of Europeanness, Whiteness, and Sameness,” International Migration Review 59, no. 3 (2025): 1564–1580.

[5]Coalition agreement between CDU, CSU and SPD, Verantwortung für Deutschland, 21st legislative period (April 9, 2025), 96, on moving those who entered after April 1, 2025 to the Asylum Seekers’ Benefits Act; for the fiscal framing see CSU leader Markus Söder’s call in August 2025 to withdraw citizen’s benefit from Ukrainians in order to relieve the federal budget. See also note 11 below.

[6]Cathryn Costello and Michelle Foster, “(Some) Refugees Welcome: When Is Differentiating between Refugees Unlawful Discrimination?,” International Journal of Discrimination and the Law 22, no. 3 (2022): 244–280, here 244.

[7]On this framing see Daniel Drewski and Jürgen Gerhards, “Why Do States Discriminate between Refugee Groups? Understanding How Syrian and Ukrainian Refugees Were Framed in Germany and Poland,” American Journal of Cultural Sociology (2024); and Jannis Panagiotidis, “Just Like Us? ‘Sameing’ Ukrainian Refugee Migration,” Journal of International Migration and Integration (2025).

[8]The study follows a constructivist grounded-theory approach: Kathy Charmaz, Constructing Grounded Theory (London: Sage, 2006).

[9]Denys Gorbach, Yevheniia Polshchykova, and Anastasiya Ryabchuk, “Elusive Privilege: Class, Race and Gender in Ukrainian War Migrants’ (Un)Employment in France,” Dialectical Anthropology 49 (2025): 747–763.

[10]Deutscher Bundestag, Antwort der Bundesregierung auf eine Kleine Anfrage der Fraktion Die Linke, BT-Drs. 21/4103 (February 17, 2026): 22,787 deportations from Germany in 2025, roughly 13 percent more than in 2024. For France, Ministère de l’Intérieur, Direction générale des étrangers en France, “Les éloignements d’étrangers en situation irrégulière en 2025,” January 27, 2026: approximately 15,500 forced removals from metropolitan France, up 21.1 percent on 2024.

[11]Bundesregierung, “Rechtskreiswechsel: Geänderte Leistungen für Geflüchtete aus der Ukraine,” press release on the cabinet decision of November 19, 2025; and, on the further tightening across 2025, AIDA, Country Report: Germany — Update on the Year 2025 (Brussels: ECRE, 2026). The standard citizen’s benefit rate for a single adult in 2026 is 563 euros per month; the corresponding rate under the Asylum Seekers’ Benefits Act is approximately 455 euros.

[12]Grit Grigoleit-Richter and Elen Fübbeker, “Beyond Immediate Protection: Gender, Race, and the Reception of Displaced Ukrainians in Germany and the United States,” Journal of International Migration and Integration, published online April 13, 2026.

[13]AIDA, Country Report: Germany — Update on the Year 2025. The 1,329,742 figure is the number of people who had fled Ukraine registered in the Central Register of Foreigners at the end of 2025.

[14]Lena Näre, Dalia Abdelhady, and Nahikari Irastorza, “What Can We Learn from the Reception of Ukrainian Refugees?,” Nordic Journal of Migration Research 12, no. 3 (2022): 255–258.

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About the author:

Maria Grynevych is a doctoral candidate in Political Science at Justus Liebig University Giessen. Her dissertation, Exploring the Civic Identity of Ukrainian Refugee Women in Germany Amidst the Russian–Ukrainian War, examines forced displacement, civic identity, diaspora, integration, belonging, and return — and shares the displacement experience of the women it studies. Since 2014 she has been chief editor of SocPortal.info, an independent Ukrainian social-news outlet. In Germany she led Democracy Moves, a civic-participation project for refugee women from Ukraine at elbarlament, with the Federal Agency for Civic Education (bpb), and she currently coordinates a Ukraine-focused democracy-support project under the Danish Institute for Parties and Democracy framework. She holds degrees in law and in teacher education and lives in Leipzig.

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Citation: Maria Grynevych, A Privilege That can be Withdrawn: Ukrainian Refugee Women Between Welcome and its Limits. in TRAFO – Blog for Transregional Research, 13.08.2026, https://trafo.hypotheses.org/?p=67495

 

 

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