At the border between Ukraine and Poland, handwritten signs greet exhausted refugees staggering towards safety. Local people are coming out to offer not just words of welcome but practical help; beds in their own homes or lifts to anywhere refugees might have relatives, even if it’s hundreds of miles away. Car hire firms are making free vehicles available, while off-duty firefighters and teenage scouts help bewildered families at train stations. Eastern Europeans who lived through the cold war need no help grasping the magnitude of what is happening to their neighbours.
But they are not alone. Ireland scrapped visa requirements for Ukrainians as war broke out and the EU as a whole is expected to offer the right to settle for three years without applying for asylum. Contrast that compassion with Britain’s foot-dragging contribution to this particular war effort, which by the weekend had amounted to a tone deaf (and hastily deleted) tweet from immigration minister Kevin Foster suggesting refugees could always try to get fruit-picking jobs here, followed by a belated announcement from Boris Johnson that Ukrainians living in Britain could apply for some relatives to join them. The Scottish and Welsh administrations are itching to go further, and Priti Patel, the home secretary, suggested on Monday afternoon that the government could now create some form of “humanitarian route”, although offered little clarity about who might qualify. But having made the right early calls on economic sanctions and arming Ukraine, Johnson’s government clearly misjudged the public mood on refugees. He has underestimated British generosity now, just as he repeatedly underestimated the selflessness people would show during a pandemic. It’s an oddly revealing blind spot to have.
For this war has got under our collective skin. Britons are gripped not only by the human tragedies unfolding, but by the courage and resilience that ordinary Ukrainians have shown, under a president whose resolve to endure whatever his people endure alongside them makes us long for inspiring leadership. Teenagers are following Zelenskiy’s updates on Instagram and TikTok, their imaginations captured by stories of heroic resistance, even as their parents collect up old clothes and toys to send to refugees. The sea of blue and yellow visible in the stands when Chelsea played Liverpool at the weekend might feel like an empty gesture but it’s telling ministers something urgent about the national mood. When readers of the Daily Mail group titles raise a quarter of a million pounds in a day for a refugee appeal, it’s clear where middle England’s feelings lie.
Some will ask bitterly if it’s just because they’re white that fleeing Ukrainians seem to evoke more sympathy than people crossing the Channel in sinking boats. But the resentment stirred against eastern Europeans during the runup to Brexit, when Nigel Farage openly suggested he would feel “uncomfortable” having Romanian neighbours and Poles living in Britain suffered hate crimes, suggests it’s not that simple; so too does public support in 2015 for resettling Syrian migrants in Britain. The truth is that public opinion is unpredictable, contradictory, and prone to emotional swings. People still respond viscerally to the sight of fellow human beings fleeing a war, perhaps especially when they feel guilty about not wanting to intervene militarily. Good leadership is about seizing the moment when events are pushing people in a benevolent direction, not lagging sulkily behind the times. As the moderate Tory Reform Group argued in a statement calling for the Home Office to waive most, if not all, visa restrictions, in a humanitarian crisis “how we respond says much about the humanity of our own country”.
Ben Wallace, the defence secretary, suggested on Monday morning that Britain was hesitating because the EU might prefer to keep refugees on the borders of neighbouring countries, from where they can easily return home once it’s safe. But that’s a strategy for a short and limited conflict, not for what may become a long and bloody siege war in which any occupation would be followed by a bitter insurgency. The UN refugee agency is braced for up to 4 million refugees. The foreign secretary, Liz Truss, has rightly warned that we could be in this for the long haul.
Across Europe, governments are visibly recognising that like 9/11, this is one of those moments that shake the kaleidoscope. Germany has already made a historic shift, abandoning a postwar position on rearmament that was taken for reasons which still emotionally resonate today. Switzerland, long the world’s most accommodating banker, is joining economic sanctions. Historically neutral Sweden is arming Ukraine. The EU has shaken off its reputation for painfully slow, bureaucratic decision-making, taking bold leaps on sanctions, the supply of weapons and the idea of Ukrainian accession to the EU. Old beliefs and practices that no longer fit the times are being shed at speed and Britain should not be so arrogant as to think it is exempt. The country senses it, even if its leader does not.
Gaby Hinsliff is a Guardian columnist
Join a panel of journalists, hosted by Michael Safi, for a livestreamed event on the Russia-Ukraine crisis. On Thursday 3 March, 8pm GMT | 9pm CET | 12pm PST | 3pm EST. Book tickets here
