«No one is interested in resolving legalisation issues». Why Belarusians struggle to legalise themselves in Ukraine
Collage: Vlad Rubanov for Graty and Euroradio
Human rights defenders warn that many Belarusians who chose to stay in Ukraine, despite the war, are now being forced to leave because of problems obtaining local documents. Among them are soldiers who fought on the front line, as well as civilians whose passports expired or were lost in the chaos of war. Without proper documents, legalisation becomes almost impossible.
Why Belarusians face such difficulties and what can be done — Graty and Euroradio investigate.
Belarusians and the migration service
Human rights defenders from the Free Belarus Centre, an independent civic initiative, say that problems with residence permits for Belarusians in Ukraine worsened sharply after Russia’s full-scale invasion in February 2022. The Centre was initially founded in Ukraine in 2020 to provide humanitarian support for those fleeing repression under Aliaksandr Lukashenka’s regime. Following the invasion, it relocated its headquarters to Poland, where it continues to assist Belarusians in exile.
In February 2022, Ukrainian authorities suspended the processing of applications from citizens of Russia and Belarus, after Moscow used Belarusian territory — with Lukashenka’s consent — as a launchpad for its troops in the assault on northern Ukraine and the capital Kyiv.
Belarusians who sought to remain in Ukraine and renew their documents were often met with refusals. The migration service typically gave them just ten days to leave the country, after which their stay was deemed illegal .
As Palina Brodzik, director of the Free Belarus Centre, told Euroradio and Graty, at that time, the State Migration Service (SMS) began issuing mass rulings on forced returns, often without sufficient legal grounds. The organisation condemned this approach, describing it as a “policy of forced expulsion” targeting Belarusian citizens left in a vulnerable legal position. In practice, Brodzik noted, effective mechanisms for appealing such decisions were either unavailable or failed to offer genuine protection.
By the autumn of 2022, however, the Cabinet of Ministers of Ukraine adopted a resolution extending the validity of residence permits until the end of martial law. At the same time, Belarusians who had remained in the country and were legally present at the start of Russia’s full-scale invasion were granted the right to continue processing their residence permits.
Foreigners serving in the military — along with their relatives, including the families of fallen soldiers — were also granted the right to apply for immigration permits (permanent residence) or temporary residence, even if their passports had expired. For Belarusians, whose passports are valid for ten years, this provision offered a critical pathway to legalisation.
Palina Brodzik notes that the situation is gradually stabilising, though many unresolved issues persist. She also highlights the psychological toll: residence permits must be renewed annually, which for Belarusians brings additional stress. This stems from the uncertainty of the war’s first year, when, as she recalls, “you could hear anything at all and get all possible reactions from the migration service.”
This was echoed by Ukrainian human rights defender and migration lawyer Oleksii Skorbach, who is currently serving in the Ukrainian Armed Forces. He describes Ukraine’s migration policy towards Belarusians as “traditional schizophrenia.”
“On the one hand, Belarusians can submit documents to extend their temporary or permanent residence using a passport that has expired or is subject to exchange — that is, without turning to the Belarusian authorities. On the other hand, at the local level, migration service staff often refuse to accept such documents, out of ignorance of the law or due to personal prejudice,” the expert explains.
How to obtain a residence permit
As of the end of June 2025, more than 11,000 Belarusian citizens were registered with Ukraine’s State Migration Service (SMS) as permanent residents, and over 3,000 held temporary permits. These figures were provided by the SMS in response to a joint request from Graty and Euroradio.
Between 1 March 2022 and 31 July 2025, a total of 2,202 Belarusians were granted temporary residence permits, while 1,085 received immigration permits and 1,608 were issued permanent residence permits.
During 2022–2023, the SMS did not separately track applications from Belarusian citizens for residence permits. Such data has only been collected since January 2024. By 31 July 2025, 844 Belarusians had applied for temporary residence permits and 478 for permanent ones.
The State Migration Service also reported that between 1 March 2022 and 31 July 2025, 32 Belarusian citizens applied for refugee status or recognition as persons in need of additional protection. Of these, three were granted refugee status, while a further 14 received additional protection.
At the same time, official data show that in the first half of 2025, 15 Belarusians left Ukraine under the procedure of forced return, and another six were deported, though it remains unclear to which countries. As of now, four Belarusian nationals are being held in temporary accommodation centres awaiting expulsion.
For most Belarusians, the most accessible way to remain in Ukraine is to apply for a temporary residence permit, valid for one year. This option is open to foreigners who arrive in Ukraine for employment or on gig contracts (most commonly in the IT sector) and hold a valid work permit. It also applies to correspondents of foreign media, members of religious organisations registered in Ukraine, students and education workers, volunteers, family members of Ukrainian citizens, military personnel and instructors assisting Ukraine’s defence forces, as well as founders, beneficiaries or participants of Ukrainian-registered companies — provided their share in the authorised capital is at least €100,000 at the official exchange rate.
Forget Europe. You’ll sit here now,’
With a temporary residence permit, Belarusians can legally live, work or study in Ukraine. However, this status offers only limited rights: it does not guarantee full access to banking, education, or healthcare services.
A permanent residence permit — effectively an immigration permit — is available under stricter conditions. It can be obtained, for example, by a spouse who has been married to a Ukrainian citizen for more than two years; by children or parents of Ukrainian citizens (including guardians and custodians); or by individuals whose spouses were killed while serving in Ukraine’s defence forces.
Additionally, the state may establish immigration quotas for specialists in science and culture, or for highly qualified professionals deemed essential to Ukraine’s economy. These provisions extend to their spouses and underage children, provided they relocate together. The same rules apply to foreign investors who contribute at least $100,000 in foreign currency to Ukraine’s economy.
In addition, foreigners — particularly Belarusians — who have faced persecution in their home country and risk torture or even death if returned, may apply for asylum in Ukraine. Yet, as the Free Belarus Centre points out, recently, only a handful of applicants has been granted this protection.
“I didn’t wait for a second chance for them to jail me”
“They throw you around like a football, and you are just an unfortunate Belarusian who wants to live his life,” says 34-year-old stylist Aleh Osipau, an asylum seeker who has battled Ukraine’s migration service for years.
Osipau fled Belarus in October 2020 after joining the protests against election fraud. Detained for 72 hours under the charge of mass riots, he was unexpectedly released. He went home, packed a backpack in fifteen minutes, and headed straight for Ukraine.
“They let me out of the temporary detention facility on Akrescina street in Minsk absolutely by accident. The next day, they realised and started calling. But I was already long gone. I didn’t wait for the second or third chance for them to jail me,” he recalls.
Collage: Vlad Rubanov for Graty and Euroradio
Without an EU visa in his passport, he headed to the first safe country — Ukraine. He stopped in Kharkiv, drawn by a friend and the city, which reminded him of his native Minsk. Although he considered moving on to Poland, financial difficulties and a sense of belonging kept him in Ukraine.
Aleh turned to the Office of the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees, as well as to the Polish consulate. The latter offered to issue him a visa, but for this, it was necessary to pay for insurance, which, Aleh says, he could not afford at the time.
“I don’t remember the exact sum, but at that period I lived in a mode of critical financial spending. And within two weeks, while all this was happening, I somehow changed my mind about going to Poland. I thought the food was tastier here; everything here was so cool. It was late autumn, early winter, and Kharkiv is not the most beautiful city in winter. Still, I was comfortable at that moment. Maybe because my friend was nearby. And going to Poland to nowhere seemed doubtful. So, I decided to stay,” says Osipau.
At the UN refugee agency, Aleh was advised to apply for asylum. That marked the beginning of a lengthy and arduous process of legalisation.
Until 2022, Belarus was considered a safe country
Human rights defenders note that the asylum procedure in Ukraine was already highly complex before the war — and it remains so today. Applicants must prove a risk of persecution in their country of origin. Previously, for Belarusians, even the initiation of a criminal case — for instance, for participating in the 2020 protests — was sufficient grounds for protection. Since the Russian invasion, however, grounds can now also include material support for Ukraine, which in Belarus may itself trigger criminal liability.
Yet even proof of money transfers in support of the Armed Forces of Ukraine, or screenshots from social media, is often dismissed by the State Migration Service (SMS) as insufficient.
According to lawyer Oleksii Skorbach, before Russia’s full-scale invasion in February 2022, Ukraine did not view Belarus as a country from which asylum could reasonably be sought. Even after the 2020 protests and mounting evidence of repression, the SMS continued to classify Belarus as a “democratic country with its specifics.”
“All the publications about the arbitrariness of the security services, the killings, the persecution of activists — none of it was taken into account. The courts upheld the migration service’s position, reasoning that while there were individual violations, they were not systematic or critical. Applicants were not deemed to be in real danger,” explains the human rights defender.
The situation worsened dramatically after 24 February 2022. As Skorbach notes, in the eyes of many Ukrainian institutions, Belarusians began to be automatically perceived as accomplices of Lukashenka’s regime.
«Forget Europe. You’ll sit here now»
In the first months following Russia’s full-scale invasion, Aleh Osipau threw himself into volunteering. Working with the international charity foundation Sirius, he coordinated organisational tasks: securing donors, negotiating partnerships, overseeing shipments, and managing both the accounting and distribution of humanitarian aid.
But by October 2022, when Russian forces began targeting Ukraine’s energy infrastructure and blackouts became routine, burnout hit.
“I realised I was finished — I urgently needed to leave. I couldn’t give myself to people anymore. I lived and breathed this work, felt like I was saving the planet. So my boyfriend and I packed our things and went to the border,” Osipau recalls.
He was certain the border guards would let him through even without a passport, which had been taken when he applied for asylum — after all, he wasn’t a Ukrainian citizen. But they didn’t.
Collage: Vlad Rubanov for Graty and Euroradio
He returned to Kharkiv and once again turned to the migration service. There, he says, officials suggested he withdraw from the asylum procedure to reclaim his passport. But when his application was processed, Aleh was told the document had been destroyed in the Security Service building after a Russian missile strike on central Kharkiv on 2 March 2022. He was left with nothing –no passport, no legal status.
Armed only with a certificate confirming the loss of his passport, Aleh attempted to cross the border again. There, he recalls, he was met with hostility.
“So you thought you could come here, ask for asylum, we’d shelter you, and then as soon as things got tough you’d run straight off? Forget Europe. You’ll sit here now,’ the head of the border service told me. I left the crossing in tears. They didn’t let me say a word. I heard plenty about Belarus,” he says.
Aleh versus the State Migration Service
After failing to leave Ukraine, Aleh returned to Kharkiv and re-applied for refugee status. The migration service turned him down.
He then took the matter to court. On 6 June 2023, the Kharkiv District Administrative Court ruled that the inaction of the regional office of the State Migration Service (SMS) was unlawful and ordered the agency to decide whether to accept Aleh Osipau’s refugee application. The appellate court upheld this decision.
Aleh re-entered the procedure, but in February 2024, his case was rejected again. The SMS dismissed his application as “obviously unfounded.” He filed another lawsuit.
This time, Aleh had a new argument: his name had appeared on the Russian interstate wanted list — a mechanism often used at Belarus’s request to pursue dissidents facing politically motivated charges.
Even so, on 24 October 2024, the Kharkiv District Administrative Court once again rejected his claim, declaring his demands unsubstantiated. The court concluded that he had not provided sufficient evidence of ongoing persecution. According to the ruling, the SMS could reasonably rely on the fact that in Belarus he had been released from the temporary detention facility due to lack of grounds for further custody; he was never formally a suspect, had no restrictive measures imposed, was not subject to procedural actions, and had freely crossed into Ukraine — all of which, in the court’s view, meant Belarusian authorities did not want him.
On 14 January 2025, the Second Administrative Appellate Court ruled that the assessment of an asylum seeker’s arguments must be carried out by the migration service during the substantive consideration of the application — not at the preliminary stage of deciding whether to accept it for review.
The judges found that the SMS had failed to properly evaluate the applicant’s situation in his country of origin, had not examined up-to-date information about conditions in Belarus, and had not addressed the potential risks to the applicant’s life, safety, or freedom in the event of return. Instead, the migration body limited itself to citing Belarusian legislation and the fact that the applicant was not officially wanted, without directly challenging the circumstances he presented.
The panel also noted that the SMS had ignored evidence from the applicant’s social media, where he had publicly documented his volunteer work in Ukraine and his membership in the LGBT community.
As a result, Aleh again prevailed in court, re-submitted his application to the SMS, and is now awaiting a decision on refugee status, which must be made by August. If granted, he will finally obtain legal protection in Ukraine; if denied, he intends to challenge the refusal once more.
“I really just want to hug friends”
Despite the bureaucratic hurdles, Aleh managed to integrate quickly into life in Kharkiv.
“Everyone supported me — even those who, before the full-scale invasion, regarded Lukashenka as a competent leader and couldn’t understand why Belarusians were fleeing their country,” Osipau recalls.
He now attends Ukrainian language courses and actively engages with the local community. Yet, his legal status remains precarious. His only identity document is a colour certificate with a photo issued by the State Migration Service. While it allows him to move freely within Ukraine and take up formal employment, it does not grant access to basic services: he cannot open a bank account, and even something as routine as receiving a COVID vaccination is off-limits. His medical expenses, meanwhile, are covered by the UNHCR.
Now Aleh dreams of something simple: securing his status and finally being able to travel — even if only temporarily — to the EU.
“I want to visit friends, see my loved ones. Perhaps I could meet my family on neutral ground. I haven’t seen them for five years. More than anything, I just want to hug my friends,” he says.
“In the SMS, even though I have served more than three years, they said they cannot help”
For Ukraine’s State Migration Service (SMS), the absence of an identity document remains a critical obstacle for foreigners seeking legalisation. Officials emphasise that it must be either a passport issued by the country of origin or a special document provided by a UN body, such as the UNHCR. Without one of these, a person cannot apply for a residence or immigration permit, the agency stated in its official response to Graty and Euroradio.
This gap in the system has left many Belarusians stranded. One of them is 25-year-old Emil Lobeiko. He left Belarus in 2021 to study and work in IT in Poland. But after Russia launched its full-scale invasion, he decided to join Ukraine’s defence “to help resist Russian imperialism and defend the freedom and independence of Ukraine.”
“I made this decision because I consider this struggle just and important not only for Ukraine, but also for the future of Belarus,” Emil explains.
He enlisted in the International Legion, where he took on a wide range of duties: first as a second machine-gunner, then as a loader for an anti-tank system, and later as part of a reconnaissance unit.
Collage: Vlad Rubanov for Graty and Euroradio
Until August 2024, when the Verkhovna Rada finally amended the law “On the Legal Status of Foreigners and Stateless Persons Participating in the Defence of the Territorial Integrity and Inviolability of Ukraine,” Belarusian volunteers faced the same legalisation problems as civilians.
The amendment changed that. Foreigners and stateless persons defending Ukraine are now entitled “to obtain a temporary residence permit or immigrate, even if their documents have expired.”
For Emil, however, the struggle continues. Currently, in the process of transferring to another unit, he had hoped to resign due to health problems, but was instead deemed fit for service. At the same time, he is trying to secure a Ukrainian residence permit. His only valid document is a Combatant’s Certificate: he surrendered his military ID when submitting his resignation request, and his passport was lost in Kramatorsk in 2023.
“I myself do not know what to do to stay in Ukraine legally,” Lobeiko admits. “Because in the State Migration Service, even though I have already been serving for more than three years, they said they cannot help at all, since I do not have a passport, and copies are not acceptable to them.”
He is now waiting for a copy of his contract to try again, this time at the SMS headquarters, where he hopes to apply either for a residence permit or asylum. Half-joking, Emil adds that without a passport, “at least they still won’t be able to kick me out of the country.”
The volunteer believes the real problem lies in Ukraine’s underdeveloped system for handling such cases.
“For example, I see that no one is interested in resolving legalisation issues — or maybe they simply don’t have the time. Even at my unit, the military command didn’t help with solving paperwork problems. I’m sure they didn’t even intend to: they don’t know these mechanisms and assume someone else deals with it,” he explains.
Meanwhile, in July 2025, President Volodymyr Zelenskyi signed into law a measure on multiple citizenship that, among other things, simplified the process of obtaining citizenship for foreign military volunteers. Instead of serving under contract for three years, they will now need to serve only one. Yet the law will not come into force until six months after its adoption — a delay that leaves volunteers like Emil still caught in limbo.
“To leave or fall outside the law”
One of the most pressing issues, says Free Belarus Centre head Palina Brodzik, is the narrow window for collecting documents after the end of labour or military contracts. Applicants have just three months to assemble a complete package of papers for a residence permit. Once this period expires, their legal stay in Ukraine will come to an end.
“Even in cases where Ukrainian officials express willingness to help, the process quickly runs up against bureaucratic hurdles and poor coordination between institutions — for example, between the SMS and the Ministry of Defence. The required documents — a petition from the Ministry of Defence, a copy of the contract, a Combatant’s Certificate, and other personal papers — are often impossible to gather within the deadline. As a result, applicants face a stark choice: leave Ukraine or find themselves outside the legal field,” Brodzik explains.
This assessment is echoed by Volodymyr Yavorskyi, human rights defender and expert at the Centre for Civil Liberties. He notes that contracts are sometimes terminated retroactively, causing applicants to lose part of their 90-day period of legal stay, while military units often take months to prepare the necessary paperwork.
Collage: Vlad Rubanov for Graty and Euroradio
For servicemen, Yavorskyi adds, the most significant difficulty lies in proving a legal ground for residence.
“To submit documents, you need to find a registered address with an owner willing to list you in their apartment. And only those with more than a year of continuous combat can obtain a residence permit — effectively three years of uninterrupted service, which in reality doesn’t happen,” he says.
Yavorskyi also points to a range of other obstacles Belarusians face in Ukraine: the near impossibility of opening bank accounts (many were frozen after 2022), limited access to insurance and notarial services, problems exchanging driver’s licences, difficulties registering marriages, and — since Ukraine suspended its agreement with Belarus in 2022 — the inability to recognise Belarusian educational diplomas.
“The recognition procedure is practically impossible to complete now, as the Belarusian Embassy in Ukraine is not functioning. Because of this, many doctors have already left for other countries,” Yavorskyi explains.
Separately, Brodzik highlights the institutional mindset within the SMS. While the agency treats Belarusians more neutrally than Russians, she says, “the overall impression is still that the presence of citizens from the neighbouring country is seen as undesirable.”
Against this backdrop, human rights defenders are increasingly advising Belarusians in Ukraine to consider leaving for EU countries, where legalisation procedures are clearer, and protection mechanisms are stronger.
This article was prepared with the support of n-ost and the Friedrich Naumann Foundation for Freedom.
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