The more than 4 million Ukrainian refugees already arrived in the EU will need shelter, food, medical assistance and schooling for the children. In the short term, the increased spending will also increase the GDP of the European Union. An estimate of the costs is possible only in an approximate way, but calculations suggest that they could exceed 40 billion euros, which will mainly fall on the four EU member states closest to Ukraine. This is estimated by Zsolt Darvas, economist of the Brussels think tank Bruegel.
From the EU, unspent funds from the EU budget have already been mobilized for the Ukrainian refugee crisis and 10 billion euros from Next Generation EU have been reallocated to support refugees. The uneven distribution of reception costs for Ukrainian refugees means that at least part of them should be shared, it also notes. And then the establishment of a new EU fund seems the most sensible option. In the medium term, the integration of refugees who will remain in Europe should be facilitated with targeted labor market policies, language training, effective education and skills validation processes. At the moment according to the figures of the humanitarian crisis created by the Russian invasion of Ukraine they see about 11 million people, in a country of 41.3 million in 2021, have left their homes. At the beginning of April 6.5 million Ukrainians were internally displaced, while as of 3 April the number of people who fled the country was estimated at 4.2 million, 90% of whom fled to the European Union. The estimate of the 40 billion costs is made in comparison with the 2015-2016 refugee influx, when the highest number of new monthly asylum applications was 161,000.
In the current crisis, there have been days when more than 200,000 refugees have arrived from Ukraine. As for the countries, according to UNHCR data as of April 3, Poland (2.5 million – 6.5% of the Polish population), Romania (643,000 – 3.4%) are hosting the largest number of refugees. Moldova (395,000 – 15.3%), Hungary (390,000 – 4%), Russia (351,000 – including some who may have been forcibly displaced – 0.2%) and Slovakia (301,000 – 5 , 5%). These are numbers referring to border crossings with Ukraine, but many refugees have continued. Three quarters of the Ukrainian refugees who entered Moldova have already left. Within the European Union, Ukrainians can move freely due to the activation of the directive on temporary protection and therefore the number of those who have moved from one EU country of initial recipient to another is not known.