For refugees
If you are leaving your home, your country and want to apply for asylum in another Western European country, it is important to have your asylum application with you:
- Passport or other identity document
- Documents of the following children with you (passports, if any, birth certificates)
- Documents confirming kinship, such as marriage certificates, birth certificates. Even if your relatives are not coming with you now, this may later be the basis for their relocation and family reunification.
- If you do not have these documents (lost, burned, etc.), take any other documents – driver’s license, military ID, educational documents, birth certificates, savings books, certificates from the housing office, housing ownership registration, etc. The more documents you have in your name, the better.
- If you have any, keep other evidence that you were in real danger. Photos in your phone of destroyed or damaged housing, videos of shelling or bombing will be useful.
- Don’t forget your phone and its charger. Also take photos of your most important documents on your phone in case they are lost or stolen.
- Keep your tickets and documents confirming the route of your trip-tickets, gas station receipts, etc.
For those who are leaving the territory of hostilities in Ukraine for safety reasons:
- You can go by car, but be prepared for huge traffic jams. People travel from Kyiv to Lviv in 24-26 hours, and it’s a 500-kilometer distance.
- By train. There are no tickets for sale, but you can board the train without a ticket. People travel in the vestibule and several people per seat.
- You can also go to Uzhhorod and cross the Slovak border, or the Moldovan and Romanian borders.
- In Lviv, you can take a minibus to the border crossing. Or you can take the Lviv-Przemysl express train, which now runs 6 times a day, without tickets. Just 2 hours and you are in Poland. Passport control takes place right on the train on the way.
- At the border, people are allowed to pass not only with foreign passports, but also with internal passports and birth certificates. And even without passports.
- If you do not have a biometric passport or a valid passport with a visa, you need to write an application for international protection (refugee status).
- Those who have applied for asylum will be provided with housing in special camps.
- Animals are allowed without passports, for this you need to indicate in the declaration “zgodnie z procedura nadzwyczajna”
- No negative tests are required, no quarantine is necessary.
- Women, children, and the elderly are allowed across the border without restrictions. A power of attorney from the other parent is not required.
- Men of military age 18-60 are not allowed to enter, but there are exceptions:
– a certificate of deferment from conscription and a notice of enrollment in a special military registration,
– a conclusion of the military medical commission on unfitness.
– Men with three or more dependent children under the age of 18 who are raising a child (children) under the age of 18 on their own, and who have a child with a disability as a dependent.
– Men who are adoptive parents, guardians, or whose close relatives were killed or went missing during the anti-terrorist operation.
- After crossing the border, there are volunteers who are ready to help you, including minibuses to other cities / EU countries
- If you have already crossed the EU border and you/your family need help with transportation, accommodation – register https://docs.google.com/forms/d/e/1FAIpQLSeHuzZ3ppgF5iKOXpFKeikguWn0ykZzLruJKZpiQHx23hnYbw/viewform?fbclid=IwAR01x3Oyh8ZUixPUYX4mOZTTX4kHzBsrSDbxibrRd4ZbiZXMTyHtydaDNT We leave a request and wait for volunteers to contact you.
- Poland has made domestic train travel free for Ukrainians.
