Third-Rate People

It was 6 a.m. May 26. They were still asleep when their bus en route from Madrid to Wroclaw was stopped by German police a few miles from the Polish border. Checking their documents, German policemen smiled politely at the Polish passengers and wished them a good journey. When they saw Ukrainian passports, their faces changed. One passport was torn when an officer snatched it rudely from a woman’s hands. All ten Ukrainian passengers were ordered to leave the bus and were taken to a police precinct. During the search, the passengers parted with all their jewelry and money. Their food and drinks were thrown away. Then they were searched individually. They were stripped naked and their clothes were searched inside out, even panties. It was worse than a medical examination… “I can’t even describe the humiliation and shock,” one woman said afterward. “We stood naked, we couldn’t understand a word in German, and they were just laughing and discussing something,” another woman confirmed. Stunned and scared, they could not understand why they were treated like that.

Those eight Ukrainian women and two men were no drug traffickers, robbers, or murderers. They were ordinary peasants on their way home from Spain where they had worked on legal contracts with Spanish employers. In three months, each of them had earned about ?2,000. One woman was planning to buy some clothes for her three little children, another had to pay for her father’s surgery, and the rest had to repay debts or simply had been unable to find a job in Ukraine.

…When the interpreter turned up at last (he spoke Russian), he explained that the passports had incorrect visas, so the passengers were detained for an illegal stay on German territory and would be deported. Then, the policemen told them that they would have to pay ?1,000 each for their own deportation and another ?500 fine, plus the prosecutor’s fee. Then the poor people were given some papers in German to sign. The interpreter explained that it was their “statement of payment”.

Some passengers tried to demand a phone call to the Ukrainian embassy and the Ukrainian consul. According to Olga R., this is what they were told: “Woman, before you demand the same, we called your embassy but nobody answered and nobody will. You can call if you like, but it’s no use. Nobody is coming for you here, because they know you have problems.” The detainees asked for a lawyer and were told, “Yes, if you please, but you’ll have to pay. One hour for a German lawyer’s work is ?100 and a Ukrainian lawyer is more expensive.” As Olga told the ZN, the policemen warned them, “If you try to raise hell and get on our nerves, we’ll jail you all.” One woman who continued to protest was hit on the head with a plastic bottle. Practically all the detained Ukrainians said that the German policemen had treated them very rudely, evidently enjoying it. “You know, they laughed all the time. It was like some kind of circus show to them,” says Olga.

Then they were taken to the court. When they were pushed into a minibus, the Germans injured one woman’s arm, but paid no attention to it. The arm swelled and ached and the unfortunate companions bandaged it with what they had on hand. The trial did not take long. All the documents were ready. Of course, they were in German. A Russian-speaking interpreter translated them orally and quickly. The Ukrainians hardly understood much. All they could gather was that they were arrested for ten days and would be deported. Then they were told to sign the papers. When they returned to Ukraine and had the papers translated into Ukrainian, they learned that they were banned from entering Germany indefinitely. Olga tried to protest: “I wasn’t carrying drugs or firearms. You didn’t catch me hustling on the street. I didn’t arrive in Europe illegally. I was just going home from Spain. I may have violated some laws of yours, but why do you punish me with such a big sum?” No one would listen. The detainees were taken to the precinct again.

They were not given anything to eat or drink for the whole day. In the evening, they dared to complain they were hungry and thirsty. “No problem – we have a cheap canteen here. You can buy anything you like,” said the kind policemen who had taken all their money in the morning. When the Ukrainians reminded them about it, they were given some snacks. They had their next meal 24 hours later onboard the Ukrainian plane. The women spent that night in a refugee camp with awful insanitary conditions, and the men were cuffed and taken to a prison where they were searched again, and very thoroughly, too. Several times they were locked in the toilet for several hours. In the morning, cuffed, they were brought to the precinct. On the evening of May 27, the Ukrainians were deported.

On the way to the Berlin airport, they were escorted by a dozen armed policemen (the men were cuffed again until they were seated in the plane). It was only after on board that the unlucky Ukrainians received envelopes with their personal belongings and the miserable rest of the money they had earned from the Spanish fields…

According to official and unofficial sources, between 300 and 500 Ukrainian citizens are having serious problems returning home from Spain. They got there by different ways, including contracts concluded by several Ukrainian employment agencies with Spanish farmers. The news of the incident in Germany quickly reached other Ukrainian guest workers and their employers as well as the authorities of Spain, Germany, and other Schengen countries. Now Spanish employers do not want to risk transporting Ukrainians by old routes. Neither do Ukrainians wish to share the sad experience of their unlucky compatriots. The only possible and safest way home is by air, but it is too expensive for Spanish employers, let alone Ukrainians who have earned their modest pay by hard work. Most Ukrainian guest workers already have their three-month contracts and temporary stay permits expiring or have already expired. They can not leave Spain and must live on the money they have earned. They phone to Ukraine in despair and do not know what to do. More and more Ukrainian, Spanish, and German officials are getting involved in this problem. Everybody knows who is to blame but nobody can make a way out.

Spain

Last fall, Spain’s labor ministry disseminated information in Ukraine about Spanish employers’ interest in Ukrainian workers. A dozen Ukrainian recruiting agencies undertook the task of providing a workforce. One of them was Lviv-Intourtrans, which negotiated with the Spanish agricultural association Freshuelva. In September the parties signed a contract, under which Lviv-Intourtrans transported Ukrainian workers to Spain, including those ten who were arrested in Germany. The Ukrainian party undertook to provide a sufficient choice of workers, inform them about the details of employment on Spanish terms, instruct them on their future personal contracts, and take care of the formalities, including visas and other required documents. Freshuelva undertook to transport the Ukrainian workers to and back from Spain by bus. The Ukrainian workers paid for their journey to Spain and the return travel expenses had to be covered by their employers.

The Ukrainian firm recruited people and helped them collect the documents required for visas. The documents and a copy of the contract with the Spanish association were submitted to the Spanish embassy in Kyiv. The contract stated clearly that the workers would return to Ukraine by bus. The same kind of transport was declared in the visa documents. Spanish bodies thoroughly checked personal data on each job applicant. Each of them also signed a written obligation to return to Ukraine in time. Only after that did they obtain their visas.

The column “Valid for” reads: “ESPAÑA (1 TRANS 05 SCHENGEN), from 26.02.08 to 30.06.08. The column “Type of Visa” reads “D”; “Number of Entries: “1”; “Duration of Stay”: “90 days”. The column “Remarks” states that the visa was issued for temporary employment by contract for 180 days.

Ukrainian guest workers have obtained such visas from the Spanish embassy for years and have had no big problems until recently. Having received the much coveted permit to visit a foreign country, they usually do not take a closer look at the stamp. Actually, it would be pointless to delve into the intricate and constantly changing Schengen rules: even in Schengen countries, very few can explain all the nuances.

It took the ZN several days and quite a few consultations with experts to find out what the letter “D” stands for. As it turned out, it is a national employment visa which gives the right to stay and work in a particular country only (in this case Spain). In reply to the ZN’s official inquiry Siegrun Meyer, first secretary and chief of the press and PR department of the German Embassy in Ukraine, explained, “A traveler can easily identify a national visa: instead of “Schengen Staaten” there is the name of the country in its language in the first line. For example, it is “Deutschland” in German visas and “España” in Spanish visas. The letter “C” means a Schengen visa and the letter “D” is for national visas.

Jorje Noval Alvarez, chief of the consular department at the Spanish Embassy in Ukraine, told the ZN, “Employment visas are not regulated by the Schengen Agreement. They are issued in accordance with the national legislation of each country and are not valid outside it.” He said that the Spanish embassy would continue to issue such visas.

As far as we know, Ukrainian workers and the agency that helped them with the documents knew that the D visa allowed for them only to stay in Spain. The problem arose from different interpretations of the right to cross the territories of other Schengen countries on transit terms. Lviv-Intourtrans staffers believed that one five-day transit implied the way to Spain and back. According to them, the Spanish side said so from the very start, and the same was confirmed when the Spanish consul received representatives of the Ukrainian company and the president of the Spanish association of farmers. That was why they planned to complete the journey to Spain in sixty hours and to have another sixty hours for the journey back. They believed that the travelers would use one allowed entry to the Schengen area and having once entered it, they would not leave it when crossing Austria, Italy, and France, staying in Spain, and going back to Ukraine. They never crossed the Schengen border twice before they were arrested in Germany!

Vasyl Popovych, Lviv-Intourtrans director and a member of the Lviv City Council, wrote in a letter to Oleg Bilorus, chairman of the Verkhovna Rada Standing Committee on Foreign Affairs, that “until the last moment, Spanish consulate staffers assured us that the visas were correct, and when they were shown copies of German documents about the arrest of Ukrainian workers, they shrugged off responsibility”.

Representatives of Lviv-Intourtrans are surprised at the Spanish consul’s official reply, in which he says that the Spanish side “is trying to solve the problem of transit of entering and leaving the Schengen area” and that “the Spanish government is looking for possibilities in Spanish legislation to prevent similar incidents in the future”. They are surprised because the Spanish side never warned of possible problems of leaving the Schengen area or of the need to obtain any additional permits. In reply to the question of why the Spanish embassy issued the “D” visa, its staffers said in plain language, “You are the transporter, so take care of transport and let the embassy decide which kind of visa to issue.” Lviv-Intourtrans lays the blame for the arrest of the Ukrainians in Germany on the Spanish embassy.

However, some Ukrainian experts note that Spain simply has no other kind of visas for similar cases. The visas described above were initially intended for labor migrants who arrived in Spain for extensive periods of time and applied for residence permits. Such visas provide for transit to Spain only. Since Spain has no other visas, Ukrainian workers received what was available. They traveled to Spain and back with those visas without any serious problems, but after the Schengen area enlarged, German police tightened control over its borders.

Nobody knows how to return several hundred Ukrainian citizens to Ukraine. According to Ukraine’s consul in Malaga Tetyana Sayenko, the situation is complicated by a large strike by Spanish carriers. Many Spanish employers shrugged off the headache and simply gave their Ukrainian employees money to buy tickets – a little more than ?100. It may be enough for a bus ticket, but not enough for a flight from Madrid to Kyiv, which is ?300. Sayenko says that Spanish authorities are trying to persuade the Germans to cut the size of fines payable by deported Ukrainians, but the Germans are very unlikely to do Ukraine such a favor. And it is certainly unacceptable for Ukrainians, because regardless of what fine they pay, they will be deported and barred from Germany in the future. There is another option: to apply to the French Embassy in Madrid (France is the first country en route from Spain to Ukraine) for transit Schengen visas. However, this way is feasible only in theory, because most Ukrainian workers are illiterate in law, can not speak foreign languages, and stay rather far from Madrid. The only sure way for them to get home is to spend part of their hard-earned money and travel by plane while their permit for stay in Spain is still valid. Otherwise, they risk denial of entry to Spain again.

Hopefully, the Foreign Ministry can do something to help the trapped Ukrainians. Consular Department Chief Sergey Pogoreltsev says the ministry knows that more than 300 Ukrainian citizens are in a fix in Spain and assures: “We will consult with the Spanish side and look for a way out of this difficult situation. I understand that it is a big problem for those people to buy an air ticket with the little money they earned. We will request the Spanish side issue visas permitting them two transit journeys via other countries – I mean to enable them to travel by bus to Spain and back.”

It is still unclear how the Ukrainians who suffered in Germany can reclaim their money and have their deportation record written off. The Spanish embassy gives a professionally vague reply: “The Spanish authorities and embassy are doing everything possible at all levels to settle this problem in the best way. We are in contact with central and border authorities of Germany and the embassy of Germany in Kyiv. The governments of Spain and Germany are considering possible solutions. Both in Spain and Germany it is possible to protest officials’ unjust actions in court. We have information that the German administration has informed the interested persons.”

The Germans explain that deported persons have no right to come to Germany to defend their rights in court: they can only act via lawyers (whose fee is ?100 per hour).

Germany

Now let’s focus on the unfair actions by the officials.

As evidenced by the documents issued to the Ukrainian citizens arrested in Germany (Ukrainian translations of which they were only able to obtain after returning back to their homeland), their detention was part of a German police investigation program.

The arrest warrants for each of the Ukrainians specifies that “…s/he entered and stayed in the territory of the Schengen States in breach of the appropriate procedures”. Ms. Sigrun Mayer, commenting on this situation in a Mirror Weekly interview, said, “We regret the misfortunes encountered by the aforementioned persons. But the actions of the police were based on the law. The regulations of the Common Consular Instructions (CCI), which are common to all Schengen States, specifies that national visas only entitle their holders to pass through the territory of other Contracting Parties to travel to the territory of the Contracting Party who issued the visa (Part I, Article 22 of the CCI). The national visa does not entitle the alien to travel backward, and this regulation is common to all the rest of the Schengen States”.

For this matter, we dare to note that other States do apply this regulation, indeed, but much less strictly than Germany. For example, our Gastarbeiters passed through all France with ease, only to be arrested by the German police. According to Maria Popovych, about three dozen Ukrainian nationals who worked in the same locations as their less fortunate counterparts recently easily travelled back home via the territories of Austria and Hungary.

By the way, problems in relations with German authorities are not unique to the holders of Spanish national visas. A few days ago, one diplomat friend told the author of this article another story on the same subject. In late March of this year, he had to fly from Brussels to Kyiv by a Ukraine International Airlines aircraft. However, for some reason, the airline cancelled the direct flight, redirecting the route to fly via Berlin. Upon arriving at the Berlin airport, the aircraft was taken to a terminal servicing internal European flights, and Ukrainian passengers deplaned and proceeded to an international terminal to embark for Kyiv. But, before that happened, they had to undergo border control procedures, during which seven Ukrainians holding five-year Belgian employment visas were detained. The German border officers were absolutely uninterested in the fact that the people they arrested had air passages for direct flight from Brussels to Kyiv, that they were not bound for Berlin and ended up there not voluntarily but through the airline’s fault, that they did not roam for a long time around Germany as illegal immigrants but just transferred from one terminal to another, which was quite easy to prove by checking the landing time of the airplane that brought them from Brussels. All these circumstances were of no interest to the letter-bound Germans. These seven compatriots of ours were convoyed by five officers to an unknown destination. When our diplomat attempted to intervene, his protest drew an apparently angry reaction. What happened further to these seven is anyone’s guess. Most probably, they shared the destiny of the ten guest workers who were travelling back home from Spain…

Well, let us assume that our citizens did violate some laws, specifically the German law regulating the stay in that country. Was the punishment adequate to their fault? Did they do anything like the German football fans who were detained by a few hundred police and further deported from Austria after provoking a massive clash with their Polish ‘counterparts’ during which they called out apparently Nazi-style war cries?

It might be mentioned that the people who lacked appropriate visas in their passports just traveled on a bus through German territory and, furthermore, they were all asleep during the ride, as it took place at night. Why had they been treated so rough? Why had they been humiliated, threatened, offended and left hungry and thirsty? Was that just because they were Ukrainian nationals rather than American or French, for example? “The behavior of the German authorities should be assessed in the light of their true thinking of Ukraine as a third or even twelfth-grade country,” V.Popovych wrote in his letter to chairman of one of the Ukrainian parliamentary committees. And we cannot but disagree with this assessment. “I believe that this incident deserves an appropriate response from the upper echelons of the Ukrainian political system”, a Lviv City Council deputy said in a statement. We promise to closely follow this response.

ZN immediately approached the head of the Consular Department at the Ukrainian Foreign Ministry for comments. S.Pogoreltsev confirmed that ‘…our citizens had visas that only entitled them to pass through the territory of a single country, and they had used that right when travelling to Spain. Therefore, their visas were not valid for return transit via the territories of other Schengen States. I would like to begin my comments by stating that we had thoroughly analyzed the matter and, I would like to emphasize, it is my conviction that the measures applied against our citizens were apparently inadequate to the scope of the violation they might have committed. We will certainly continue looking into this situation: our consular office in Germany has already been given appropriate instructions, and intensive work to that end has gotten underway. Once complaints from our citizens are fully processed, we are going to address the German party with a message requesting explanations concerning this incident, and we will strongly insist that the actions of the police officers be investigated’. ‘By all appearances, our citizens did commit a violation of some kind. But I would like to emphasize that they should not have been treated that way. We must not let it happen that our compatriots are humiliated and their pride taken away. All the facts cited by our people must be thoroughly investigated, just to preclude such incidents in the future and make sure our citizens are treated with due respect,” Pogoreltsev went on to note.

“In response to a letter of request from our embassy in Berlin, the Federal Criminal Police Office of Germany confirmed that they are ready to carry out an investigation into their officers’ actions that involved deliberate infliction of harm on our nationals during detention procedures, if, of course, such was the case. Complaints from our citizens give us every reason to address a letter of inquiry to the abovementioned federal office, as well as to the Federal Police Board. A decision may also be made as to the Ukrainian Foreign Ministry filing an appropriate note with the German Foreign Office as well, which, in all probability, will be made very soon.”

Ukraine

While searching for answers to questions “Who is to blame?” and “What is to be done?” we cannot but reiterate once again that nobody is responsible for peoples’ destinies but the people themselves. The people should not have relied on a bit of luck in getting back their passports with visas while already sitting in a bus bound for a foreign country. We fully realize what kind of capabilities our people have with respect to access to the Internet, to Government offices in Ukraine, to foreign embassies in Kyiv or to highly professional legal assistance. But, nevertheless, they should have made the effort and spent a bit of their time and money before crossing the border in order to learn more about the specifics of their future stay in a foreign country, about the terms and conditions of their future employment contracts and about entry/exit procedures for some or other State, instead of wasting far larger sums of money, having problems with foreign law enforcement officials, in addition to getting into acute emotional stress. Ukrainian consul to Malaga T.Saenko, who has a broad experience with Ukrainian guest workers in the Spanish province of Huelva, says that one of the main reasons for problems encountered by Ukrainian nationals in foreign countries stems from their legal incompetence and the wrong belief that matters will be settled by somebody else. But in reality, nobody could do better than the people themselves.

If truth be told, Lviv-Inturtrans has since May 27 (the first day when information that ten Ukrainians had been detained and deported from Germany arrived in Ukraine) made vigorous efforts to help the people detained in Germany, specifically to get the deportation and exclusion warrants cancelled and to help them get their money back. On the same day, Lviv-Inturtrans Chief Executive Officer V.Popovych notified the Ukrainian Embassy in Berlin about the incident, and has not stopped camping on the doorsteps of various offices in Kyiv, Ukrainian as well as foreign, to date.

On the other hand, it should be said, for fairness’ sake, again, that the majority of Ukrainian diplomats we had consulted during our own investigation tend to place most of the blame precisely on the Ukrainian intermediary company, saying it was the latter’s responsibility to get full information on visa-related nuances and to make sure the visas entitle the Ukrainian Gastarbeiters to travel to Spain and back to Ukraine.

In the search for solutions to the return transit visa problem, we investigated three possible scenarios Ukrainian intermediary companies could try and put into practice. For the first thing, the companies, when processing visa applications and related documents, could request the French Embassy in Kyiv for Ukrainian citizens holding Spanish employment visas of the ‘D’ category be granted transit visas entitling them to pass through the territory of Schengen States while traveling back to Ukraine by ground transport. Second, Spanish employment contracts could include a provision obliging the Spanish party, with the latter’s consent, to provide visa support for the Ukrainian guest workers upon the latter’s arrival in Spain and applying for such support to the French Embassy in Madrid. Finally, employment contracts should contain a provision clearly specifying which of the contracting parties should undertake expenditures involved with the transportation of Ukrainian workers back home by air transport. These three scenarios could well work, if, of course, the unfortunate incident in the Berlin airport and the mass of resulting problems have not discouraged Spanish employers from dealing further with Ukraine…

When we began speaking about employment contracts, the Ukrainian Consul to Madrid, Vladislav Bogorad, citing his experience, told Mirror Weekly that the contracts signed by privately-owned Ukrainian companies with their foreign partners are on numerous occasions are far from perfect. This badly hits Ukrainian guest workers, many of whom are even unaware of what kind of work they will have to do in Spain. The Ukrainian diplomat believes that employment contracts with foreign employers, prior to being signed, should undergo a mandatory examination by the Ukrainian Ministry of Labor and Social Policy. When we raised the same issue with Lviv-Inturtrans, they told us that the contract they signed with Freshuelva (Huelva’s Association of Strawberry Growers and Marketers) was submitted for examination not only to the Spanish Embassy in Ukraine and the Ukrainian Consular Office in Malaga but also to the Labor and Social Policy Ministry who, based on the results of the examination, issued the abovementioned company an intermediary license for overseas employment. We don’t know how scrupulous the Labor Ministry was in examining this document. Not being professionals in jurisprudence, we don’t know whether the document was perfect or not. Still, we believe that it lacks provisions on penal sanctions for failure to comply with the terms and conditions of the contract, neither does it specify circumstances of insuperable force or contains clear-cut provisions on the contracting parties’ obligations.

In Consul T.Saenko’ opinion, many problems involved with overseas employment of our citizens would never emerge should an appropriate agreement between Ukraine and Spain in place. Ms. Saenko said that a draft of such an agreement has been prepared, but has been awaiting a signature for a long time. Why then it hasn’t it been signed? The answer is evident: the early parliamentary election and Cabinet reshuffle have deflected attention away from less important issues. However, as far as we know, newly-appointed Labor and Social Policy Minister, Liudmyla Denisova, on March 20 was authorized by President Viktor Yushchenko to sign an agreement between Ukraine and the Kingdom of Spain that would regulate immigration flows between the two countries. According to information obtained by Mirror Weekly, this document points out, for example, that employment proposals from the Spanish party should clearly specify locations of employment, the number of workers needed, requirements made for labor workers, deadlines for the selection of Ukrainian guest workers, time limits of employment contracts, working and wage conditions, workers’ living conditions, deadlines for workers’ arrival to the place of employment, payment terms for workers’ travel costs and so forth. It is obvious that for Ukrainian guest workers, such a document would be extremely valuable. March 20 is almost three months away now, but the agreement has not been signed to date, neither can anyone predict when this may happen.

The Government and Parliament are busy dealing with more important issues than ‘ordinary’ Ukrainians’ problems. By the way, the letter to the Foreign Ministry that was supposedly sent by the parliamentary foreign affairs committee after a written request concerning the incident that happened to Ukrainian nationals in Germany, addressed on June 2 by the Lviv City Council deputy V.Popovych to the chairman of the committee Oleh Bilorus, has for some reason not arrived to the Foreign Office yet. Oleh Bilorus himself - whom Mirror Weekly was going to ask questions as to what kind of measures his committee intends to undertake to protect the rights of the Ukrainian citizens that have been infringed in a foreign state, in addition to more questions concerning all the abovementioned matters – confined himself to saying via his secretary: ”Let them contact the Foreign Ministry”.

We did contact many Ukrainian diplomats, and not only at the Foreign Ministry. First of all, we tried and contacted our embassy in Berlin, which, as we have learned, was already notified of the incident. We were deeply insulted by what German policemen told us: “No matter whom or where you may phone to, nobody will help you. In addition, you will never get through, anyway”. However, we got through to the embassy at 49 30 28 88 71 16 on the first try (it is precisely the telephone number specified on the Ukrainian Foreign Ministry's official website as the number of our embassy in Berlin. Furthermore, the same number is pointed out in SMS-messages sent to all of MTS and Kyivstar mobile telephone network subscribers once they enter German territory). A female voice at the opposite end of the line kindly gave us telephone numbers of both the press-secretary at the embassy and the Consular Department officers of interest to us, and recommended that we phone again after their lunch break when the people will be back on their desks and accessible for communication. But we were so fortunate only one time. For two full days we vainly tried to get through to the embassy in Berlin at the four telephone numbers available to us, using different phones, both fixed-line and mobile, but never succeeded. We never learned the reasons why nobody picked up the phone. They may cite one thousand reasons why, but hardly even a single one would satisfy any of the Ukrainian nationals who had gotten into trouble in Germany but could never get through to the diplomatic mission of their own country. The head of the Consular Service Department S.Pogoreltsev assured us that the Consular Office in Berlin collected a highly professional team of consular workers. This may well be the case. But to take advantage of their highly professional assistance, Ukrainian citizens who may find themselves in a force-majeure situation are at least supposed to be able to reach them by phone.

By the way, just for fun, we dialed a few telephone numbers specified on the Foreign Ministry’s website as the numbers of Ukraine’s embassies and consular offices in various countries. The experiment produced the following results: a receiver was immediately picked up at embassies in Spain, Israel and France, and at consular offices in Malaga, Porto, Frankfurt am Main, Gdansk, Krakow and Lublin, but nobody answered the phones at embassies in Germany and Poland and at the consular office in Hamburg. Telephone answering services at embassies in Egypt and Turkey and at consular offices in Istanbul and Munich either recommended us to press various combinations of buttons for connection with the departments of interest, or gave information about weekdays and hours for personal reception of citizens.

We understand how many people may phone every day to each of the Ukrainian embassies. We also know how the Foreign Ministry is limited in financial or human resources. But it’s no comfort to visiting Ukrainian citizens who may find themselves in difficult situations. The state, whose high-rankers over and over again declare the interests of Ukrainian nationals staying abroad to be their first priority, would be well advised to find more money to set up call-centers and telephone hotlines at least in the countries most frequently visited by Ukrainians.

Returning back to our conversations on all of the above-listed issues with representatives of Ukraine’s national diplomatic corps, we must admit that these conversations left us with a mixed impression. During conversations with some of the diplomats, we felt sincere interest and help, while others demonstrated indifference and a desk-top approach. But what surprised us most was the fact that some diplomats, whose mission is to protect the rights of the Ukrainian citizens, were more inclined to trust in and protect (at least in interviews with journalists) those who offended them. But even if Ukrainians do violate anything, aren’t the diplomats supposed to support and protect them? “They believe their rights were abused, aren’t they? No, it cannot be the case. It’s all emotions rather than the fact. They were just hearing things! Yes, all ten of them. You know, it’s a kind of ‘mass contagion’. Hardly anything can be done about this”. This was kind of an answer we once heard.

One more unpleasant discovery to us was the apparent dislike of our diplomats for privately-owned firms dealing with overseas employment of our compatriots. “It’s pure business, they are just making money on humans!” said some of them. However, unless we are mistaken, Ukraine is a free-market economy. It may seem to be too banal, but a free-market economy rests on private business. And, if our memory serves us right, one of the Ukrainian diplomacy’s missions is protecting private businesses’ rights in foreign countries.

Anybody may well accuse private firms of ‘exporting human resources’ or ‘taking from the country its legitimate right to arrange overseas employment for its citizens’. But truth to be told, does this government do much enough to help its people in this domain? The question doesn’t need any answer. Another question of the same kind is what the Ukrainian government has done to prevent its citizens from searching for employment in another country? To the best of my knowledge, a few years ago, one election program entitled ‘Ten Steps Toward the People’ contained a promise to ‘create five million jobs’. A lot of muddy political water has flown under the bridge, but who can count how many brains and hands have flown away from this country over the last three and a half years? How many buses move to various destinations every year, taking away ‘ordinary’ Ukrainians who failed to find well paying employment in their home country?

As long as the Ukrainian government is unable to provide jobs for its citizens in their homeland (read the right to choose between working in Ukraine or emigrating in search of better paying employment) and to effectively protect their rights in foreign countries, Ukrainians will be treated as third-grade people in the so-called ‘civilized world’.

P.S. Yesterday, when this article was ready to go to press, the Embassy of the Kingdom of Spain in Ukraine told ZN that the Spanish association Freshuelva had undertaken to pay the cost of air flight to Ukraine for three groups of Ukrainian guest workers numbering a total of fifty to seventy people. We do hope that the destiny of the several hundred more Ukrainians still staying in Spain will be decided the same way.