Europe’s ‘extraordinary solidarity’ with displaced Ukrainians in 2022—rooted in images of vulnerability and cultural proximity—is increasingly being replaced by a politics of conditionality. Across Czechia, Germany, and Poland, benefits are shrinking, and public debates frame refugees less as victims of war than as workers expected to prove their worth through employment. This shift reveals how European governments, spurred on by far-right politicians who question displaced people’s right to stay, are reshaping solidarity around labor market deservingness, with troubling implications for the future of refugee protection in Europe.
In late February 2022, as Russia launched its full-scale invasion of Ukraine, European media were filled with powerful images: headlines of war’s horrors and stories of unprecedented solidarity. Across the EU, people shaken by the war and mass displacement opened their homes to refugees—often entire families with children who spoke little or no local language. Volunteers rushed to train stations and border crossings with blankets, tea, and open arms. Governments lit up official buildings in blue and yellow, pledged aid, and rolled out emergency housing schemes. The mood was one of empathy, even intimacy: people cried with refugees, and politicians spoke in emotional terms.
As a researcher from Ukraine, I was deeply moved by this response, yet I kept asking myself: how long would it last? I recalled Germany’s initial welcome of Syrian refugees in 2015, Chancellor Merkel’s words (‘Wir schaffen das’—‘We can do this’) and large-scale volunteer efforts. I also remembered that this welcome did not endure. Would solidarity with Ukrainians under temporary protection erode too?
In the first half of 2022, Ukrainians were framed as almost ‘ideal refugees’: victims of Russian aggression, but also culturally close, hardworking, and likely to integrate—or, in the language of migration researchers, ‘promising victims.’ It was striking to observe how Poland and Czechia, previously reluctant to accept asylum seekers in 2015-2016, set aside their earlier racialized migration politics and justified their unprecedented solidarity with Ukrainians by pointing to ‘cultural proximity,’ shared Christian traditions, and common histories of Russian oppression.
This framing was not limited to Czechia and Poland. Germany, which today hosts about 1.25 million displaced Ukrainians, similarly emphasized shared ‘Europeanness’ as a strong prerequisite for successful integration. Moreover, because most protection seekers from Ukraine were women—a result of martial law and the exit ban on men of conscription age—their vulnerability was further highlighted, often through gendered narratives of victimhood.
Media coverage of disrupted lives at border crossings, the war’s proximity, and the imagined cultural similarity of Ukrainians helped construct a narrative of collective vulnerability and collective deservingness. Access to labor markets, schools, and healthcare was broadly granted under the EU’s Temporary Protection Directive, though on a temporary basis.
Over time, however, this logic of cultural proximity and vulnerability was increasingly replaced by one based on employment-linked deservingness, reflected in the gradual reduction of state-supported solidarity measures.
In Czechia, which granted the highest number of protection statuses to Ukrainian citizens per capita in Europe, state support began to diminish already in the first year of the Russo-Ukrainian war. The government implemented the EU’s Temporary Protection Directive through a package of three bills known as Lex Ukraine, which by April 2023 had already been amended five times. These changes tightened eligibility for humanitarian benefits, restricted state-funded health insurance to 150 days, and capped free emergency accommodation to the same period.
Despite these increasingly restrictive measures, as early as May-June 2022, more than half of Czechs believed that their government was treating displaced Ukrainians better than its own citizens—a perception fueled at least in part by far-right campaigning. Tomio Okamura, leader of the far-right SPD, accused displaced Ukrainians of welfare abuse and claimed that ‘most Ukrainians are economic refugees draining our social benefits.’ In response, the Czech government sought to counter these narratives by emphasizing the high rates of labor market participation among displaced Ukrainians, stressing that their contributions outweighed state spending on humanitarian aid. Gradually, this shifted the dominant framing in Czechia: from viewing Ukrainians primarily as vulnerable victims to perceiving them as (and expecting them to be) productive workers.
In Germany, the coalition government has also proposed reducing social benefits for Ukrainian refugees arriving after 1 April 2025. Under the draft law, newcomers would no longer receive the more generous Citizen’s Allowance (Bürgergeld) but instead fall under the less favorable Asylum Seekers’ Benefits Act. Although pending cabinet and Bundesrat approval, the proposal has provoked heated debate. Formally, the measure targets only new arrivals. Yet Bavarian Premier Markus Söder (CSU) has demanded that the lower benefits apply to all Ukrainian refugees. He argued that welfare discourages Ukrainians from entering the labor market, again placing employability at the fore. Thorsten Frei, a senior CDU politician, echoed this criticism, highlighting Ukrainians’ relatively low labor market participation in Germany compared with neighboring states. What such claims overlook, however, are structural factors—above all, the time and difficulty involved in learning German, compared with other Slavic languages in nearby countries.
The gender dimension has also been explicitly mobilized in these debates. Stephan Mayer, a Bundestag member (CSU), called for ending payments for Ukrainian men of military age. In his view, such men should either work in Germany or return to Ukraine to serve in the army. This framing suggests a stark binary: those who are neither vulnerable (men assumed fit for combat) nor productive (employed) are rendered entirely undeserving—not just of reduced benefits, but of any benefits at all. This dynamic exemplifies the logic of performance-based deservingness, where refugees are equally expected to demonstrate vulnerability to justify protection and to contribute economically, with tax payments framed as the most valued contribution.
In Poland, debates have likewise been shaped by a gendered logic of deservingness and vulnerability. In September 2024, Foreign Minister Radosław Sikorski urged EU governments to stop providing social security payments to Ukrainian men of conscription age. By 2025, the employment-based logic of deservingness was pushed further. On 25 August, President Karol Nawrocki vetoed the government’s bill to extend child benefits and healthcare support for Ukrainian refugees beyond September 2025. He argued that assistance should be reserved only for those officially employed in Poland, framing his stance as part of a ‘Poland first’ strategy. Justifying the veto on grounds of ‘social justice,’ Nawrocki claimed that support for working Ukrainians—and only them—was fairer to Polish taxpayers.
Nawrocki’s position went further than Prime Minister Donald Tusk’s initial proposal, which would have limited child benefits but still provided continued assistance for Ukrainian families, including those in transition or temporarily unemployed. Nawrocki’s veto effectively nullified such continuation unless employment was already secured. In this regard, both Tusk’s proposal and, especially, Nawrocki’s veto signaled a broader shift: although the war continues and return remains impossible for many displaced Ukrainians, political expectations are moving away from vulnerability and toward employment-based deservingness.
As the reduction of state support for displaced Ukrainians became inseparable from reframing their deservingness around labor market integration, far-right parties and politicians weaponized this shift, pushing debates over deservingness even further. For them, the issue extends beyond financial entitlements to questioning Ukrainians’ right to remain in the host states.
In Germany, AfD leaders Tino Chrupalla and Alice Weidel denounced Ukrainians receiving what they call ‘unjustified’ welfare and suggested they should return to Ukraine. In Poland, far-right politician Grzegorz Braun campaigned under the slogan ‘Stop the Ukrainization of Poland,’ calling for the termination of temporary protection status and an end to further Ukrainian immigration. In Czechia, Tomio Okamura, leader of the far-right SPD, similarly declared: ‘The time has come for Ukrainian refugees to return home from European countries.’ Their rhetoric reframed displaced Ukrainians not only as less deserving of welfare than national citizens but as ultimately undeserving of protection.
Thus, what began as an ‘extraordinary’ moment of solidarity is increasingly giving way to a politics of conditionality, where labor market participation is elevated as the primary criterion of deservingness.
Displaced Ukrainians are no longer framed primarily as people seeking safety in a time of war, but as guests whose welcome hinges on what they can give back to the host country. Refugees are expected to prove their worth by working hard—often in precarious jobs that do not match their skills—while simultaneously struggling to learn a new language. Women face the additional burden of combining paid work with childcare and elder care, responsibilities once shared within broader family networks in Ukraine. They, too, are expected to demonstrate deservingness through gainful work.
These expectations do not exist in isolation but are shaped by a wider European context of deep insecurity. War-driven geopolitical threats, economic stagnation, and an energy crisis have heightened already pronounced anxieties about the future among broad sections of Europe’s citizenry. Far-right and populist parties have seized on these fears, weaponizing them for electoral gain and deepening perceptions of solidarity as a scarce public good. In this climate of insecurity, shrinking benefits reveal a troubling trend: what was once a host society’s duty of care (for all) is increasingly reframed as due diligence, with solidarity reserved only for those who can ‘prove’ themselves through labor.
And yet, despite these unsettling shifts, one lesson stands out. More than three years into the Russo-Ukrainian war and the resulting mass displacement, EU states still maintain support mechanisms for displaced Ukrainians. These measures are tightening and under constant attack from populists and the far right, but their persistence shows that solidarity with displaced people, however fragile, has not entirely disappeared from Europe’s political imaginary and identity.