Temporary protection for Ukrainians in EU set to be extended to 2027
In light of the ongoing war and the volatile situation in Ukraine, the EU's executive body proposed an extension until March 2027.
The member states could seal the proposal at a meeting next week.
The status of Ukrainian refugees is currently regulated by the EU Temporary Protection Directive.
They do not have to go through the usual asylum procedures and have comparatively good access to the labour market and social benefits.
According to the commission, over 4.3 million people have fled from Ukraine to the European Union since the start of the war.
Germany has taken in the highest number of refugees, with over 1.2 million people.
Member states should also prepare for a time when the Ukrainian refugees are able to return home, the commission said.
Governments should ensure there are other prospects for Ukrainian nationals, such as in the form of work or student visas.
Refugees should also receive more information about return options and be able to visit their home country more easily, the commission stated.
European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen said the EU would support Ukraine for "as long as it takes."
"Today, we propose to extend EU protection for Ukrainians fleeing the war," she posted on X. "We're also supporting Ukrainians in their choices and paving the way for their safe return home."
Magnus Brenner, the European commissioner for internal affairs and migration, announced the creation of a special EU envoy for Ukrainians.
He said that the temporary protection status for Ukrainian nationals could also be terminated before March 2027 in the event of a stable ceasefire.
At a press conference, Ukrainian Deputy Prime Minister Oleksiy Chernyshov encouraged Ukrainians to return to their homeland as soon as conditions allow.
"They are very much needed on the Ukrainian labour market to build a new, strong economy," he argued.
Hashtags
Try Our AI Features
Explore what Daily8 AI can do for you:
Comments
No comments yet...
Related Articles
The Hill
9 minutes ago
- The Hill
Germany stops military exports that could be used in Gaza
BERLIN (AP) — Germany will not authorize any exports of military equipment that could be used in Gaza 'until further notice,' Chancellor Friedrich Merz announced Friday, in a strikingly quick response by one of Israel's strongest international backers to a decision by Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu's Cabinet to take over Gaza City. The move by Germany, which has previously stopped short of tougher lines against Israel's government taken by some of its European Union allies, appeared likely to further isolate Israel in the wake of the controversial military takeover plan that has been decried by the United Nations and supporters of Israeli hostages still held in Gaza. In a statement, Merz emphasized that Israel 'has the right to defend itself against Hamas' terror' and said that the release of Israeli hostages and purposeful negotiations toward a cease-fire in the 22-month conflict 'are our top priority.' He said Hamas must not have a role in the future of Gaza. 'The even harsher military action by the Israeli army in the Gaza Strip, approved by the Israeli Cabinet last night, makes it increasingly difficult for the German government to see how these goals will be achieved,' he added. 'Under these circumstances, the German government will not authorize any exports of military equipment that could be used in the Gaza Strip until further notice.' The German government remains deeply concerned about the suffering of civilians in Gaza, he said, adding: 'With the planned offensive, the Israeli government bears even greater responsibility than before for providing for their needs.' He called on Israel to allow comprehensive access for aid deliveries — including for U.N. organizations and other NGOs — and said Israel 'must continue to comprehensively and sustainably address the humanitarian situation in Gaza.' Germany also called on Israel's government 'not to take any further steps toward annexing the West Bank.' It was not immediately clear which military equipment from Germany would be affected. Germany, with its history with the Holocaust, has been among the strongest Western backers of Israel — no matter which government is in power. Merz's government did not join announcements by President Emmanuel Macron of key German ally France and Britain's Keir Starmer that they plan to formally recognize a Palestinian state in September.
San Francisco Chronicle
9 minutes ago
- San Francisco Chronicle
Ukrainian troops have little hope for peace as Trump's deadline for Russia arrives
DNIPROPETROVSK, Ukraine (AP) — Ukrainian soldiers on the battlefield expressed little hope for a diplomatic solution to the war with Russia, as U.S. President Donald Trump's Friday deadline for the Kremlin to stop the killing arrived and he eyed a possible summit meeting with Russian President Vladimir Putin to discuss the conflict. Trump's efforts to pressure Putin have so far delivered no progress. Russia's bigger army is slowly advancing deeper into Ukraine at great cost in troops and armor while it relentlessly bombards Ukrainian cities. Russia and Ukraine are far apart on their terms for peace. Ukrainian forces are locked in intense battles along the 1,000-kilometer (620-mile) front line that snakes from northeast to southeast Ukraine. The Pokrovsk city area of the eastern Donetsk region is taking the brunt of punishment as Russia looks to break out from there into the neighboring Dnipropetrovsk region. Ukraine has significant manpower shortages. Intense fighting is also taking place in Ukraine's northern Sumy border region, where Ukrainian forces are engaging Russian soldiers to prevent reinforcements being sent from there to Donetsk. In the Pokrovsk area, a commander said he believes Moscow isn't interested in peace. 'It is impossible to negotiate with them. The only option is to defeat them,' Buda, the Spartan Brigade commander, told The Associated Press. He used only his call sign, in keeping with the rules of the Ukrainian military. 'I would like them to agree and for all this to stop, but Russia will not agree to that; it does not want to negotiate. So the only option is to defeat them,' he said. In the southern Zaporizhzhia region, a howitzer commander using the call sign Warsaw, said troops are determined to thwart Russia's invasion. 'We are on our land, we have no way out,' he said. 'So we stand our ground, we have no choice.' Trump said Thursday that he would meet with Putin even if the Russian leader will not meet with his Ukrainian counterpart Volodymyr Zelenskyy. That has stoked fears in Europe that Ukraine could be sidelined in efforts to stop the continent's biggest conflict since World War II. The Institute for the Study of War, a Washington think tank, said in an assessment Thursday that 'Putin remains uninterested in ending his war and is attempting to extract bilateral concessions from the United States without meaningfully engaging in a peace process.' 'Putin continues to believe that time is on Russia's side and that Russia can outlast Ukraine and the West,' it said. Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orbán said Friday that Europe should take the lead in efforts to end the conflict. Orbán said the leaders of Germany and France should go to Moscow 'to negotiate on behalf of Europe.' Otherwise, 'we will be sidelined in managing the security issues of our own continent,' Orbán told Hungary's state broadcaster. Orbán, who is a harsh critic of the European Union to which his country belongs, said Europe's concerns that a Trump-Putin summit might not address the continent's interests meant it should seize the diplomatic initiative. 'This war cannot be ended on the front line, no solution can be concluded on the battlefield,' he said. 'This war must be ended by diplomats, politicians, leaders at the negotiating table.' ___
Atlantic
11 minutes ago
- Atlantic
So, About Those Big Trade Deals
If there's anything Donald Trump loves more than tariffs, it's a deal. So you can understand his excitement lately. Over the past few weeks, the president has announced tariff-related deals with three major trading partners—the European Union, Japan, and South Korea—that have been hailed as major victories for the United States. In each case, America's partners agreed to accept 15 percent tariffs on their exports to the U.S. while lowering trade barriers on American goods and promising to invest hundreds of billions of dollars in the U.S. economy—in essence paying Trump to impose trade restrictions on them. 'Europe Caves to Trump on Tariffs' read a representative New York Times headline. In the days following the European Union deal announcement, the White House released a fact sheet quoting all the positive coverage. On Thursday, Jamieson Greer, Trump's top trade official, published a New York Times op-ed boasting that, with the completion of these deals, the administration had successfully 'remade the global order.' But upon closer inspection, Trump's trade deals aren't nearly as impressive as they sound. In fact, they aren't really trade deals in the traditional sense, and they might not benefit the U.S. at all. Trump did prove the doubters wrong in one important way. When the president originally announced his 'Liberation Day' tariffs, other countries threatened to respond in kind, leading many economists and journalists (myself included) to conclude that the tariffs would lead to a spiral of retaliation. With a few exceptions (notably China and Canada), that didn't happen. Instead, Trump has gotten key trading partners to back down. But simply avoiding retribution was never the goal of tariffs. The whole point of Trump's dealmaking strategy was supposedly to get foreign countries to lower their existing trade barriers—the classic purpose of a trade agreement. In his Liberation Day announcement, Trump complained at length about what he considered to be the excessive restrictions that other countries had imposed on American goods—including not only tariffs but also currency manipulation, value-added taxes, and subsidies to domestic firms—and vowed not to back down on tariffs until those countries lowered them. Scott Lincicome: What the U.K. deal reveals about Trump's trade strategy The announcements of the new deals purport to have delivered on this promise, giving Americans 'unprecedented levels of market access' to Europe, 'breaking open long-closed markets' in Japan, and making South Korea 'completely OPEN TO TRADE with the United States.' But the details of the deals, which remain sparse, tell a very different story. None include agreements by trading partners to meaningfully reform their tax or regulatory codes, strengthen their currencies, or reduce the barriers that have long been major sticking points in prior trade negotiations. Instead, the announcements are full of vague statements of intent—'The United States and the European Union intend to work together to address non-tariff barriers affecting trade in food and agricultural products' (my emphasis)—and references to things such as 'openings for a range of industrial and consumer goods.' The main concrete action that the EU agreed to was to eliminate its tariffs on American industrial products. This sounds impressive unless you're aware that the average EU tariff rate on nonagricultural goods prior to the deal was just 1 percent. The main difficulty in trade negotiations with the EU has long been its barriers on agricultural products, which appear to have been untouched by these deals. South Korea and Japan, meanwhile, agreed to allow more American-made cars into their markets—which also sounds great until you realize that the main reason American companies don't sell a lot of cars to those countries is the fact that almost nobody wants to drive a truck or SUV in Tokyo or Seoul. Lower trade barriers won't change that. What about the investments? According to the announcements, South Korea, Japan, and Europe have respectively pledged to invest $350 billion, $550 billion, and $600 billion in the United States (In an interview with CNBC, referring to the EU investment, Trump claimed that 'the details are $600 billion to invest in anything I want. Anything. I can do anything I want with it.') The EU has also agreed to purchase an additional $750 billion of American oil and gas. Those are big numbers, but they might not add up to much in the real world. The EU has no authority to require European companies to invest in the U.S. or buy its products. What the Trump administration touted as 'commitments' were mostly rough numbers based on what European companies were already planning to invest and buy. 'We can't force the company to do anything, nor will be able to pretend that we can, but we can talk to them, we can get their intentions, and we can transmit that as a faithful indication to our partners in the U.S.,' Olof Gill, a spokesperson for the European Commission, the EU's trade-negotiation body, said after the deal was announced. The 'investments' from Japan and South Korea, meanwhile, might not be investments at all. Shortly after the deal with Japan was announced, the country's top trade negotiator said that he anticipated only 1 or 2 percent of the $550 billion fund would come in the form of direct investment; the rest would mostly consist of loans that would need to be repaid with interest. South Korean officials have made similar statements. 'These numbers bear no relation to any conception of reality,' Brad Setser, a senior fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations who served as a trade adviser to the Biden administration, told me. 'Everyone has figured out that Trump really likes big numbers to sell his trade deals and doesn't need much substance to do so.' Recent history supports this view. As part of Trump's first-term trade deal with China, Beijing agreed to increase its annual purchasing of American goods by $200 billion. In the event, it didn't increase its purchasing at all. If America's trading partners didn't agree to meaningfully lower barriers to U.S. imports, and if their promises of investment are likely vaporous, then the only real concession that Trump's tariffs have won is … the right to impose tariffs. This means that the value of the deals comes down to the value of the tariffs. Tariffs can help domestic producers by making their foreign competitors' products more expensive. But tariffs can also hurt them, by raising the costs of the inputs they import to make their products. Several studies of the tariffs imposed during Trump's first term, which were much smaller and more targeted, found that manufacturing employment either stayed level or actually fell as a result. The ultimate result of the current wave of tariffs is yet to be determined, but so far, since Liberation Day, the manufacturing sector has shed tens of thousands of jobs and investment in new factories has fallen. A quarterly survey conducted by the National Association of Manufacturers in May found that optimism among manufacturing firms had fallen to its lowest point since the height of the coronavirus pandemic; trade uncertainty and raw-material costs were cited as top concerns. Rogé Karma: The mystery of the strong economy has finally been solved The new deals should at least give companies some much-needed certainty about tariff rates, which will help them make investment decisions. But in other ways, the deals actively undermine key American industries. Foreign cars, which represent the single largest American import from Japan and South Korea and the third largest from the EU, will face 15 percent tariffs. That is far lower than the rate American car companies have to pay to import car parts, which are tariffed at 25 percent, and crucial car-building materials like steel and aluminum, which are tariffed at 50 percent. As Jim Farley, the CEO of Ford, said in a recent interview, foreign competitors such as Toyota now have a $5,000 to $10,000 cost advantage over American-made vehicles. Ford projects that it will lose $2 billion in profits this year alone because of higher tariffs; General Motors forecasts losses of $4 billion to $5 billion by the end of the year. The deals announced so far are only the beginning. The Trump administration is currently in the midst of negotiations with several trading partners, including China, Mexico, Switzerland, and Taiwan, and just yesterday implemented a new round of tariffs on about 90 countries, the ostensible goal being to bring those nations to the bargaining table too. If recent events are an indication, any future pacts will be framed as historic milestones in the quest to remake the global trade system in America's favor. The White House will issue pronouncements of eye-popping investments, drastically reduced foreign-trade barriers, and major concessions to American industry. When that happens, remember to look closely at the details.
