Portugal received more than 10,000 refugees from Ukraine in three weeks
In the last three weeks, Portugal received 10,068 refugees from Ukraine. According to the newspaper “Público”the number almost equals the same number of refugees, from all countries, that Portugal has welcomed since 2015 (10,927). Ukraine refugees enter Portugal under the new protection measures launched by the Government, which facilitate and accelerate the regularization of these citizens.
As for the online dispatch platform to facilitate the submission of protection requests for its citizens or citizens of other nationalities who had to flee the territory, on Monday the Ministry of Internal Affairs (MAI) emerged that the objective is to operationalize the simplified mechanism created by the Government for anyone who has been forced out of Ukraine. “This is an exceptional risk situation, associated with a situation of armed conflict which a duty of solidarity and humanism prevails, which guides the intervention of national authorities, in line with what has been done in the overwhelming majority of European countries’, says the MAI.
According to the World Organization for Migration Three million people have already left Ukraine, 157,000 from third countries. Last year, more than 27,000 Ukrainians lived in Portugal. In 2022, after Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, the number of Ukrainians will be as high as 37,000, making the country the third highest in Portugal in terms of immigrants.