It has been more than two years since Russia launched a war against Ukraine. According to the UN Refugee Agency (UNHCR), almost six and a half million people had left Ukraine by February 2024 and dispersed primarily in Europe.
For the majority of these refugees, their network of contacts had a significant influence on where they went. While Hungary did not (and still does not) have a significant diaspora like the one in the Czech Republic, research provided to the UN by Meta shows that Warsaw, Prague and Budapest have been for a long time the top three destinations not only in the Central European region but also in Europe as a whole. Dániel Bagaméri, Head of Mission at International Organization for Migration (IOM) in Hungary, told us that Ukrainian refugees think in terms of cities, not countries, and so their destination is Budapest, not Hungary.
If we look at UNHCR data, we can see that Hungary has few registered asylum seekers in international comparison (The status of ‘asylum seeker’ was created by the European Union to guarantee temporary protection to people who are forced to leave their country en masse and need to enter neighbouring countries as a result of war or humanitarian disaster).
Government officials like to boast that Hungary is carrying out the largest humanitarian operation in its history to provide aid for people coming from Ukraine. It may indeed be the largest our country has undertaken, but it is unclear what the government means by it, and how many people are actually supported. In September 2022, Minister of Foreign Affairs and Trade Péter Szijjártó spoke about receiving one and a half million refugees, while in October 2023, then-President of Hungary Katalin Novák told an Australian newspaper that the country was providing aid for almost two million refugees. (We asked the Ministry of Foreign Affairs and Trade what Szijjártó had meant by taking in refugees, and what kind of measures this entailed, but we did not get a reply.)
We asked Norbert Pál, government commissioner responsible for people fleeing the Russian-Ukrainian war about the number of Ukrainian refugees currently residing in Hungary and the number of Ukrainian citizens applying for asylum. His reply did not get us any closer to the truth, but he did share yet another figure: "the number of people fleeing the war has already exceeded 1.2 million."
Pál also indicated that more than 40,000 people have applied for asylum, the same figure provided by UNHCR , but the number of people in Hungary who have fled the war is larger as the data do not include dual nationals. This may not be a significant factor because, as all refugee organisations acknowledge, the majority of people arriving in Hungary do not wish to stay. Many of them remain for a short time, some of them leave immediately, and an increasing number of people return to Ukraine.
In addition, a person who is granted asylum/temporary protection status in Hungary is free to travel within the EU and to return to their country of origin. This means that their asylum status is no indication that they necessarily live in Hungary.
Another difficulty is that several recruitment companies supported by the state are active in Transcarpathia and along the borders. Workers lured here may bring their children as many employers provide accommodation for them, too. According to estimates, thousands of Ukrainians are employed in Hungarian factories this way. Their situation is not without issues because their work permit automatically expires in case they are laid off. This would make them effectively deportable although they have fled the war just as asylum seekers did.
Today, only a small proportion of people crossing the border are fleeing the war. In January this year, just over 2,000 individuals were issued temporary residence permits needed to apply for asylum if they decide to stay in the country. The vast majority do not apply for asylum either because they move on to another country, return to their home country, or because they have dual citizenship that entitles them to reside in Hungary.
The National Police Headquarters (ORFK) provides data on a daily basis about the number of people entering from Ukraine directly and the number of those coming from Ukraine through the Romanian-Hungarian border. But there is no information on how many of them leave Hungary and where they are headed. In fact, they count only the border crossings, but these include daily commuters and people coming to do some shopping, none of whom are fleeing the war. From the government’s perspective, this helps inflate the numbers and maintain a heightened sense of pressure caused by refugees, but it does not give us a clear picture of the actual number of people fleeing Ukraine.
All in all, this suggests that the Hungarian authorities simply do not keep track of the number of Ukrainians having left Ukraine after the war and currently residing in Hungary.
The most important data at our disposal is from the UNHCR on the number of people who have applied for asylum. But not only does it not include everyone, it is a static figure that does not keep track of those no longer in Hungary.
UNHCR spokesman Erno Simon said that of the roughly 41,000 asylum seekers, 36,000 had been granted the status in the first six months, while the remaining were awarded over the following one and a half year. Once again, this demonstrates the decline in the number of arrivals.
There are no official figures on people who for whatever reason chose not to apply for asylum. Hungarian citizens coming mostly from Transcarpathia are likewise excluded from the records. NGOs and other organisations assess their numbers from time to time through opinion polls. According to head of Migration Aid András Siewert the ratio of Ukrainians unregistered as asylum seekers may be between 30 and 50%.
In the summer of 2023, Budapest launched a cash support programme with the support of UNICEF for Ukrainian families with children living in the capital. Nearly 1,500 families with a total of 2,500 children applied for the programme. Based on participation, Ukrainian families with children in Budapest are estimated at 5,000 people. Coupled with the 1,500-2,000 people without children, the number of Ukrainian refugees in the capital would be around 6,500-7,000. The national figure could be double or even triple of the figure in Budapest, putting the estimate for Hungary as such to be between 15,000 and 21,000.
According to a senior official of another organisation helping Ukrainian refugees, who preferred to remain anonymous, there could be around 12,000 Ukrainian children in Hungary. Taking into account the average family size of refugees, this would suggest that there are around 36,000 Ukrainian refugees in Hungary.
By comparison, the UNHCR puts the number at 50,000, although a UNHCR official spoke of 65,000 at a commemoration event.
The experts interviewed for this article agree that once people recognized in early 2023 that the war would go on, some of them, like women with young children, returned to the countries bordering Ukraine – Poland, Slovakia, Romania and Hungary. This was going to make it easier to return home at regular intervals. For many of them, this commute takes place every week because, for example, they have livestock at home, a garden to tend to, or elderly family members to look after. Those who stayed in Ukraine typically live in poor conditions, and they often receive basic supplies from Hungary like blankets, food, warm clothes, etc. The relatives commuting back and forth to help them are registered every time they cross the border, further inflating and complicating the official numbers.
That said, the vast majority of those who wanted to leave Ukraine have already done so. According to our interview subjects, the number of permanent arrivals has dropped sharply this year, but the "newcomers" are in a much worse mental state than those who came immediately after the war’s outbreak. While the latter fled the war, the new arrivals are coming from the war.
According to IOM data, roughly half of those who left Ukraine across Europe have already returned home. According to IOM Head of Mission Dániel Bagaméri these people had different reasons and moved in various waves. First, those who have left Western Ukrainian areas less affected by the devastation of the war are more willing to go back. Second, experience shows that the number of people returning to Ukraine increases at the start of the school year. One can imagine that a 17-year-old Ukrainian on the verge of graduation is not attracted to finishing his studies in the Hungarian education system. Third, and obviously, homesickness and the desire to restore family unity is a huge motivating force that gets people to move home despite the war. Finally, Ukrainian refugees face discrimination (we will elaborate on this issue more in the upcoming articles of the series). This is true for Hungary, but Ukrainian refugees returning from Western European countries also report to aid organisations that they feel discriminated against in the labour or housing market.
One might ask how it is possible to have a community the size of a small town, its members entitled to health care and education, and yet we have no idea of their exact number. To be sure, the financial considerations behind the inflated figures are obvious. The government has a vested interest in boasting about the number of Ukrainian refugees in order to maximize EU funding. There is a clear political interest in doing the same along the southern border, too. At the same time, international organisations also receive funding based on the number of refugees they care for.
However, there might just be an opportunity to get a clearer picture. The plastic cards certifying asylum status are valid for only a year. Last year, the government extended their validity by decree, but this spring the re-registration of asylum seekers is expected. This could give a more accurate figure of how many are currently residing in the country – unless, of course, another government decree is used and the inflated numbers remain in place. Either way, it seems like there are fewer Ukrainian refugees living in Hungary than the government would have liked to pretend before the European Parliamentary elections campaign.
This article was written in the framework of The Eastern Frontier Initiative (TEFI) project. TEFI is a collaboration of independent publishers from Central and Eastern Europe, to foster common thinking and cooperation on European security issues in the region. The project aims to promote knowledge sharing in the European press and contribute to a more resilient European democracy.
Members of the consortium are 444 (Hungary), Gazeta Wyborcza (Poland), SME (Slovakia), PressOne (Romania), and Bellingcat (The Netherlands).
The TEFI project is co-financed by the European Union. Views and opinions expressed are however those of the author(s) only and do not necessarily reflect those of the European Union or the European Education and Culture Executive Agency (EACEA). Neither the European Union nor EACEA can be held responsible for them.
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