A crisis within a crisis Across Europe, Roma fleeing Russia’s war against Ukraine face discrimination, segregation, and mistreatment
In late October, two Roma teenagers were accused of murdering a taxi driver in Korkino, a village in Russia’s Chelyabinsk region. Rumors about the incident quickly spread, and within hours, angry residents descended upon the homes of their Roma neighbors, where they clashed with riot police. The incident was reminiscent of a case that occurred five years ago, when a major brawl broke out between Roma residents and other locals in the village of Chemodanovka in Russia’s central Penza region. It’s no coincidence that Roma people are rarely mentioned in the Russian media except when they’re targeted by violence: Roma in Russia are systematically excluded from institutions like schools and workplaces — a fact that’s both a consequence and a driver of the widespread xenophobia they often face. Similar issues persist throughout Europe, and this deep-seated discrimination has greatly affected the thousands of Roma people forced to flee Ukraine after Russia’s full-scale invasion.
The following is an abridged translation of an article that first appeared in Kit, a Russian-language newsletter from the creators of Meduza.
In the field next to the road running through the Polish village of Kidałowice is a building resembling an army barracks. Stepping inside is practically impossible — the smell is unbearable. Apart from the structure, there’s nothing around for miles.
In the summer of 2023, Yana Serova, a volunteer with the refugee support organization Russians for Ukraine, found a child lying in a pit outside the barracks, surrounded by garbage. He was around two or three years old.“I thought he was dead,” Serova says.
The child — who turned out to be alive — was living in a refugee camp for Roma fleeing Ukraine. Local volunteers weren’t allowed into the camp, not even to deliver humanitarian aid; Serova was only able to enter because she was volunteering for the international humanitarian organization Oxfam.
“There were so many children and almost no adults. The kids were just running around, not even wearing underwear — literally. I’m not exaggerating,” she recalls. Sometimes boys aged 10 to 12 would wear skirts simply because there was no other clothing available.
The kids in Kidałowice were left to fend for themselves because the adults were working in nearby farmers’ fields, Serova explains. They were paid four złoty an hour — less than one euro. “Since they didn’t have any money at all, this was the only way they could earn something,” she says.
According to Serova, the camp staff later put a rule in place: the refugees had to have somebody supervising the kids. “They started coordinating shifts, leaving a couple of adults to watch over the entire shelter,” she says. “Of course, they didn’t pay much attention to other people’s kids, so you’d often see five-year-olds looking after two-year-olds.”
Once a week, employees from another humanitarian organization would come to visit the camp in Kidałowice. They’d been given a room in the barracks, which they cleaned up, furnished with tables and chairs, and turned into a school for the refugee children. “The children would eagerly wait for them [every week]. They’d wash their hands and try to change their clothes so that they’d be clean, especially for school. Then they’d run up to the women and show them: ‘Look, my hands are clean! Pick me!’”
Only about 15 people could fit in the room at a time; the rest would stand outside and watch the lucky students learn. “It made you want to cry,” one volunteer says. “For them, this was like a small piece of a life they couldn’t even dream of: a clean classroom with books and people speaking to them with respect. Every single one of them longed to be in that class.”
Roma children are often excluded from formal education systems, both in Ukraine and in other European countries,which leaves many without basic literacy skills. In Poland, the influx of refugees from Ukraine has caused a shortage of spots in schools, and Roma children are often the last to be admitted. According to the Danish Refugee Council, this is a direct effect of systemic discrimination.
The first signs of segregation among refugees from Ukraine, according to Yana Serova, appeared in the summer of 2022. For example, a large refugee camp near Przemyśl, which was set up in a former Tesco supermarket building, introduced a rule that it would only take in those with foreign passports. According to Serova, this was a way to exclude Roma families, very few of whom had such documents.
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A Europe-wide problem
Roma refugees in Poland have faced discrimination not just in Przemyśl and Kidałowice but throughout the country. A hostel in Warsaw, for example, introduced a policy that explicitly barred “single men, people with animals, and Roma,” according to Olga Kobzeva, a coordinator with the refugee aid organization Rubikus.helpUA.
According to Georgiy Nurmanov, a coordinator for Russians for Ukraine, even volunteers often treat Roma refugees with the same disdain they typically receive “throughout the post-Soviet space.” “They chase them away, serve them last, and yell at them,” he says.
Roma refugees encounter daily xenophobia in neighboring Hungary and Czechia, as well. One report from the Memorial Anti-Discrimination Center tells the story of Artur, a schoolboy from Mariupol who fled to Czechia with his family after Russia’s full-scale invasion.
“At some point, they stopped giving my mom welfare payments, even though other refugees from Ukraine continued to receive them. At my school in Czechia, almost nobody wanted to be my friend, even though they treated the other Ukrainian kids fine,” he said.
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Hamburg, Germany, also has a camp specifically for Roma refugees, according to Ukrainian Roma ethnographer Yanush Panchenko. He tells Kit that the Hamburg camp is cleaner and less crowded than a previous one where he stayed.
Panchenko also says that many Roma learn about the Hamburg camp by word-of-mouth. He noted that the camp’s staff tries to ensure that only Roma people stay at the camp.
In Moldova, Roma refugees were sent to a separate shelter set up in an abandoned building on a Chișinău university campus. Some were even removed from a general refugee reception center and taken to the Roma-specific facility, according to the European Roma Rights Center, which criticized the shelter’s substandard living conditions.
Staff and volunteers at MoldExpo, the country’s largest refugee center, said in 2022 that authorities had an unwritten rule to deny Roma refugees accommodation. A report from the European Commission against Racism and Intolerance confirms that this kind of segregation and discrimination took place.
Moldova’s treatment of Roma refugees has also drawn criticism from Human Rights Watch, which noted that the authorities even counted Roma separately from other Ukrainian refugees in official statistics. Both humanitarian organizations and private families offering housing were reportedly unwilling to take in Roma families in many cases.
‘A vicious cycle’
Roma people have long faced rampant discrimination in Europe, where they number about 10–12 million. “When I was still in school, somebody literally spit in my face, calling me a gypsy. I still remember it, and even now my voice trembles when I think about it,” says Elena Sîrbu, who went to school in the early 1990s.
Georgy Nurmanov tells Kit that he’s struck by the level of illiteracy he’s observed among Roma refugees from Ukraine. Many Roma people he’s spoken to, even in their 40s, can neither read nor write, he says. He recalls talking to one family that intended to travel to Bulgaria but had somehow ended up in Poland: “I helped them study geography using a globe. These people had no understanding of which country was where, or even where they were right now.”
Elena Sîrbu echoes this concern, estimating that up to 80 percent of Roma women arriving in Moldova are illiterate. Without mobile phones, she says, they also struggle to access information about available resources for refugees.
“People have a certain view of Roma — that they don’t want to work and that they often don’t go to school,” Olga Kobzeva tells Kit. “Discrimination and lack of education push Roma into begging, theft, and other illegal activities from an early age, which in turn leads to even greater stigma and segregation. It’s a vicious cycle.”
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Many Roma end up in prison. Former human rights advocate Slavka Kukova, who grew up in a Roma ghetto in Plovdiv, Bulgaria, notes that about 80 percent of the country’s prison population is Roma. One of Plovdiv’s ghettos, Stolipinovo, is still sometimes referred to in media reports as “the most dangerous place in Europe.”
“Not all of these people are actually guilty [of crimes],” Kukova says. “But their illiteracy makes it easy for police to manipulate them, pin unsolved crimes on them, and lock them up for life. Nearly every family faces the same issues: children abandoned in orphanages, fathers or grandfathers in prison, and women falling victim to human trafficking,” Kukova says.
A lack of legal protections compounds the poverty and social marginalization that Roma people face. Roma account for the largest stateless population in the world. The United Nations notes that 80 years after Nazi Germany killed up to half of Europe’s Roma, their rights have seen little improvement.
Kukova argues that governments often benefit from the Roma’s plight. In Bulgaria, for instance, far-right parties frequently demolish Roma settlements ahead of elections as a PR stunt. Mayors also reportedly buy Roma votes during campaigns.
“The authorities have a vested interest in keeping this population illiterate and dependent,” Kukova says. “Everything that can’t happen outside the ghetto happens within it.” Police rarely respond to calls from these areas, ignoring problems such as child marriages and trafficking.
The general attitude toward Roma refugees from Ukraine in Europe is well illustrated by a 2022 comment from Miloš Zeman, then President of Czechia. “I believe that the Czech people will continue to support Ukrainian refugees,” he said. “However, I would make one small exception regarding Roma Ukrainians: I’m not entirely convinced that they’re not economic migrants.”