Mobility and the legal infrastructure for Ukrainian refugees

The scale and speed of forced displacement following the Russian invasion on 24 February 2022 has been staggering. At the time of writing, an estimated 7 million have been internally and displaced and more than 5 million have fled Ukraine for another country–making it the largest refugee crisis in European history since the Second World War. 1 The vast majority have arrived in neighbouring EU countries. In the course of 2 weeks, Poland alone received more refugees than the European Union combined during the previous peak year of 2015. But hardly any European country has been left unaffected–from Portugal in the South to Finland in the North, emergency measures have been put in place to receive and host new arrivals. A key factor behind the pace and distribution of arrivals has been Ukrainian refugees' unique access to mobility into and through Europe.