![\"\"](\"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/01\/20251221ak-wams_237A8613_6cebef38-8e21-4207-8f1b-6d5b5db6cb48-1024x683.jpg\")
Vitaly Osipov, 48, and his son Bogdan, 13, found refuge in the central German town of Rotenburg an der Fulda. | Alex Kraus for POLITICO<\/p>\nVitaly and Bogdan Osipov found refuge from Russia\u2019s full-scale invasion in central Germany, but for nearly two years the father and son have been waiting for Yuliia Hetman \u2014 Vitaly\u2019s partner and Bogdan\u2019s mother \u2014 to join them. What keeps the family apart is no longer the war itself, but a European Union database.\u00a0<\/p>\n
The family is among a growing number of Ukrainians caught in a trap created by the bloc\u2019s security architecture. Ukrainian nationals serving sentences in Ukrainian prisons seized by Russian forces \u2014 or who were forcibly transferred to Russia by occupying forces during the war \u2014 are being flagged in the EU\u2019s Schengen Information System as potential threats to public order and internal security.<\/p>\n
Hetman, who was serving a sentence for violent crime in a Mariupol prison when the war began, completed her sentence under Russian occupation. She has since managed to leave the occupied city, but she cannot reunite with her family in Germany, stalled at the Polish border by a German-issued alert that bars her from entering much of Europe.<\/p>\n
\u201cThese people survived war, abduction and abuse in Russian detention,\u201d said Hanna Skrypka, a lawyer at the Kyiv-based NGO Protection of Prisoners of Ukraine. \u201cThey are victims of war crimes \u2014 not security threats.\u201d<\/p>\n
Our investigation found that Ukrainian authorities shared with law-enforcement agency Europol the names of at least 3,738 former prisoners who had been held in penal institutions in Russian-occupied Ukrainian territories, according to documents reviewed by POLITICO.<\/p>\n
Vitaly Osipov, 48, and his son Bogdan, 13, found refuge in the central German town of Rotenburg an der Fulda. | Alex Kraus for POLITICO<\/p>\n
While Ukrainian authorities say they made no requests to flag individuals in the EU\u2019s Schengen Information System, former detainees, rights groups and lawyers say the information-sharing coincided with a surge in entry bans \u2014 separating families and leaving former prisoners trapped by opaque security decisions they cannot meaningfully challenge.<\/p>\n
\u201cWe should be very careful not to treat Ukrainians from temporarily occupied territories as a security threat by default,\u201d said Thijs Reuten, a Dutch center-left MEP and the European Parliament\u2019s shadow rapporteur on Ukraine. \u201cUkrainians are our allies \u2014 they are fighting for their freedom and for democracy.\u201d<\/p>\n
\u201cOnce someone is on a list,\u201d continued Reuten, \u201cwho is accountable for getting them off?\u201d\u00a0<\/p>\n
From a besieged prison to a closed border<\/strong><\/p>\n Hetman was three years into a five-year sentence, for causing bodily harm to a man she says assaulted her, when women\u2019s penal colony No. 107 in Mariupol was sealed off from the outside world in February 2022. Prison authorities suspended access to telephones and television as Russia launched its full-scale invasion. \u201cWe suspected something was happening, but didn\u2019t know what exactly,\u201d she recalled.<\/p>\n Soon, shelling began. Prison staff fled. Water and electricity disappeared. Toilets were destroyed. The women dug pits, cooked over open fires and slept in basements. About a month into Russia\u2019s assault on Mariupol, Russian forces took control of the city\u2019s women\u2019s prison \u2014 subjecting the Ukrainian prisoners held there to a harsher regime marked by forced labor and arbitrary rules.<\/p>\n \u201cLife changed completely,\u201d Hetman says. \u201cFor the smallest violation, everyone was punished.\u201d<\/p>\n Forty kilometers away, Osipov and his son were hiding in the basement of their neighbors\u2019 house, near the home where the family had lived together before Yuliia\u2019s imprisonment \u2014 surviving on canned food they cooked over open fires. Neither partner knew the other was alive.\u00a0<\/p>\n After nearly six months underground, volunteers offered Osipov a route into the European Union via Russia and Belarus. Before leaving Ukraine, he and his 13-year-old son Bogdan braved Russian shelling to visit the penal colony in Mariupol.<\/p>\n Osipov explained to a Russian soldier at the gate that Hetman had been imprisoned inside. The soldier let him enter. \u201cWe saw each other and burst into tears,\u201d recalled Osipov.<\/p>\n Hetman completed her sentence a year later. After her release in September 2023, she made plans to travel to Germany, where Osipov and Bogdan had settled in Rotenburg an der Fulda, a quiet riverside town where relatives already lived. Vitaly and Bogdan cleaned their apartment, bought groceries \u2014 and waited.<\/p>\n Then, early one morning, Hetman called from the Ukrainian-Polish border, crying. \u201cThey won\u2019t let me in,\u201d she said, according to Osipov\u2019s recollection.\u00a0<\/p>\n Polish authorities at the Dorohusk checkpoint told her she was barred from entering the European Union. They had found her name attached to an alert in the Schengen Information System.\u00a0<\/p>\n Inside the database that separated a Ukrainian family<\/strong><\/p>\n Europe\u2019s guaranteed freedom of movement relies on a database.<\/p>\n The Schengen Information System joins the bloc\u2019s border-control and law-enforcement authorities to share real-time alerts during police checks and along its external perimeter. The system consists of a central database technically operated by the EU agency eu-LISA, under the oversight of the European Commission, national systems in each participating country, and a secure network linking them.<\/p>\n How and why individuals are entered into the Schengen Information System can be difficult to trace \u2014 including for those affected by the listings themselves. Each Schengen country is responsible for creating, maintaining and enforcing its own alerts, which are immediately visible and enforceable across all other participating states. While national authorities formally refuse entry at the external border checkpoints they manage, the underlying decision to place an SIS alert may have been taken earlier by another member state, without the involvement of the country carrying out the check.<\/p>\n Information relevant to SIS alerts may be shared via Europol, the EU\u2019s criminal intelligence and law-enforcement coordination agency, which has no arrest powers of its own but facilitates the exchange of information among national authorities via coordination offices known as SIRENE bureaus. Europol itself does not issue SIS alerts, but information shared through the agency may be passed on to member states, which then decide independently whether to enter or maintain an alert.<\/p>\n Hetman\u2019s name appears to have found its way into the database as part of the list of former prisoners in Russian-occupied Ukrainian territories shared with Europol in early 2023. While Ukrainian authorities say their government shared the list for informational purposes only, Hetman\u2019s name later appeared in the Schengen Information System \u201cfor the purpose of refusing entry,\u201d according to a Polish border refusal decision reviewed by POLITICO.<\/p>\n The alert appears to have originated in Germany. The country\u2019s Federal Criminal Police Office confirmed, in a response to a data-access request reviewed by POLITICO, that the refusal-of-entry alert was issued by Germany and remains in force unless withdrawn by the issuing authority. (A certificate from Poland\u2019s Office for Foreigners shows that Poland did not play a role.)<\/p>\n Germany\u2019s federal police office said there was no blanket treatment of former detainees as a security risk and that it had no knowledge of such a practice. The agency did not respond to follow-up questions after we identified documents showing that German authorities had issued refusal-of-entry alerts in multiple such cases.<\/p>\n Polish border guards told POLITICO that they see only the identifying data and the instruction to refuse entry \u2014 not the reasons for the listing \u2014 and conduct no individualized assessment at the border. Issuing authorities may lawfully withhold that information on security grounds, leaving affected individuals aware of the ban but often unable to determine why it was imposed or how to challenge it.<\/p>\n The structure leaves responsibility fragmented: Information flows across borders, but decision-making and accountability remain national \u2014 and often opaque. In five separate instances reviewed by POLITICO involving former Ukrainian prisoners who served sentences in Russian-occupied territories or who were forcibly transferred by Russian forces from Ukrainian prisons, border authorities across multiple EU countries enforced entry bans based solely on active SIS alerts, without citing any issues with passports, visas, overstays or travel documents.<\/p>\n According to Skrypka, a small number of former prisoners who still had valid passports were able to cross directly from Russia into the Schengen area in early 2023. She said she was aware of five such cases, all of which occurred before Ukrainian authorities shared a list of former prisoners with Europol. After that information-sharing, she said, at least 10 former prisoners who attempted the same route were refused entry at Schengen borders. The organization now advises former prisoners not to attempt to cross those borders.<\/p>\n Europol confirmed to POLITICO that it processes \u201coperational data\u201d from Ukraine under a long-standing cooperation agreement, but did not address whether information about former Ukrainian prisoners was later shared with member states in a way that contributed to SIS refusal-of-entry bans.<\/p>\n In a written reply to POLITICO, Ukraine\u2019s Prosecutor General\u2019s Office said it is overseeing criminal investigations into the deportation and forcible transfer of Ukrainians from occupied territories to Russia or Crimea \u2014 acts classified under Ukrainian law as war crimes and crimes against humanity. The office added that it had no information indicating that former detainees recognized as victims in such proceedings were treated as security threats or subjected to restrictions abroad, including difficulties crossing borders or reuniting with family members.<\/p>\n \u201cWhy Ukrainian authorities passed the list to Europol, we don\u2019t know,\u201d said Skrypka, whose Kyiv-based NGO supports Ukrainian prisoners and documents abuses linked to Russian aggression. \u201cWhat does Europol have to do with it?\u201d<\/p>\n How a Schengen alert follows Ukrainians across borders<\/strong><\/p>\n Vasyl Soldatov, 48, a Ukrainian former prisoner forcibly transferred to Russia during the war, was released in May 2025 into Russian-occupied Crimea. By then, his wife was living in the Czech Republic as a war refugee, and he hoped to continue his arduous journey directly to her.<\/p>\n Soldatov explored his potential routes from Crimea to the Czech Republic. While still in Crimea, Soldatov was informed by Czech authorities he was subject to a refusal-of-entry alert in the Schengen system, entered not by the Czech Republic but \u2014 as in Hetman\u2019s case \u2014 by German authorities.<\/p>\n In a written response reviewed by POLITICO, Czech police said Soldatov is not listed in the country\u2019s national register of \u201cundesirable persons\u201d and stressed that there is no general practice or internal instruction to automatically treat people who have been held in, or transferred through, occupied territories of Ukraine as security risks.\u00a0<\/p>\n Both EU and national laws require Schengen refusal-of-entry alerts to be based on objective, case-specific grounds. Prisoners-rights advocates argue that some European countries were violating <\/strong>that standard by instead using automatic or collective groupings, like the generalized suspicion attached to the label \u201cformer prisoner.\u201d<\/p>\n Hugues de Suremain, legal director of the European Prison Litigation Network, added that while Ukrainian authorities have cited risks of coercion or recruitment by Russian security services in general terms, he has not seen evidence of documented, individualized assessments that would justify blanket measures applied without individual review. Without that, said de Suremain, war-affected detainees risk being treated as suspects by default.<\/p>\n Germany\u2019s Interior Ministry told POLITICO that refusal-of-entry alerts are issued following individualized assessments and that authorities may take into account information received via Europol when evaluating security risks. The ministry said it does not keep statistics on how often such alerts are applied to specific categories and declined to comment on concerns raised by human rights organizations that former detainees could be treated as security risks due to fears of recruitment by Russian intelligence services.<\/p>\n However, neither Germany\u2019s Interior Ministry nor Federal Criminal Police Office explained how such individualized assessments were conducted in cases involving former Ukrainian prisoners, or whether information shared via Europol contributed to those decisions.<\/p>\n \u201cOnce a name starts circulating through law-enforcement channels, it can be very hard to undo,\u201d said de Suremain, who represents several former Ukrainian prisoners before the European Court of Human Rights.<\/p>\n Like many former prisoners who find their movements blocked, Soldatov still does not know exactly how his name entered the database. While individuals have the right to seek access to, correction or deletion of SIS data, requests must be directed to the country that entered the alert, and authorities may lawfully withhold the underlying grounds in security-related cases. In the case of Poland, the country\u2019s Ombudsman office said in a statement that when database entries rely on classified security-service information, individuals may be unable to see or meaningfully challenge the evidence against them, leaving judicial review as the primary safeguard.<\/p>\n Soldatov, meanwhile, managed to return to Ukraine with help from Protection of Prisoners of Ukraine, traveling from Crimea into Russia and then via Belarus. He is counting the days until May, when Czech authorities have told him the Schengen Information System refusal-of-entry order will expire.<\/p>\n When security systems leave no safe route<\/strong><\/p>\n Even former Russian prisoners who do not intend to live in the European Union, but simply seek to pass through it on their way back to Ukraine, can be blocked by Schengen refusal-of-entry alerts.<\/p>\n For Ukrainians released from Russian prisons, legal exit routes are limited. Reaching Ukraine typically requires traversing Russia\u2019s western borders, including into Schengen states such as Norway, Finland, Estonia or Latvia \u2014 where former prisoners flagged in the Schengen system are turned away even when seeking only onward travel back to Ukraine.\u00a0<\/p>\n Passage through Belarus, meanwhile, remains an option only for those with valid Ukrainian passports \u2014 documents many former prisoners no longer have. Eastern Ukraine remains an active war zone.<\/p>\n That typically forces those hoping to leave Russia for Ukraine to route themselves through Georgia, where former prisoners can approach the Ukrainian embassy to obtain documents and then attempt onward travel through third countries. But when problems arise at the Russian\u2013Georgian border \u2014 including transit refusals or prolonged administrative detention \u2014 the journey can collapse altogether. Last summer, 80 former detainees were held for weeks in a windowless basement near one border crossing, dependent on charities for food and medical care, their attorneys argued to the European Court for Human Rights.<\/p>\n \u201cPeople cannot reunite with their families \u2014 and they cannot even get home safely,\u201d said Skrypka. \u201cSIS entry bans affect both.\u201d<\/p>\n The long wait<\/strong><\/p>\n For Osipov, every weekday now begins the same way. At 5 a.m., after preparing breakfast for his son Bogdan, he boards a commuter train for a 30-minute ride to a fish-processing facility in nearby Neukirchen, where he spends the day washing and sorting caviar. He returns home around nine in the evening, cooks dinner for his son \u2014 and prepares lunch for the next day.<\/p>\n \u201cAt work, phones are forbidden except during breaks. I call Bogdan immediately,\u201d Osipov says. \u201cMy heart bleeds knowing he\u2019s alone all day.\u201d<\/p>\n They haven\u2019t seen Hetman since the summer of 2022. \u201cMy son asks every day when his mother will come,\u201d Osipov says. \u201cI have no answer.\u201d<\/p>\n Those who work on Ukraine issues in Brussels say they know of no coordinated effort to reassess how Schengen security systems are applied to Ukrainians who spent time in Russian-run prisons.\u201cThis is a special situation that needs to be dealt with in a special way,\u201d said Reuten, the European Parliament\u2019s shadow rapporteur on Ukraine. \u201cOtherwise, we risk separating people from their families for years during wartime \u2014 and that is unacceptable.\u201d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Vitaly and Bogdan Osipov found refuge from Russia\u2019s full-scale invasion in central Germany, but for nearly two years…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":714477,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[5174],"tags":[768,2000,6562,299,5187,1699,40,34589,75108,657,771,335],"class_list":{"0":"post-714476","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-eu","8":"tag-borders","9":"tag-eu","10":"tag-eu27","11":"tag-europe","12":"tag-european","13":"tag-european-union","14":"tag-immigration","15":"tag-schengen-area","16":"tag-schengen-zone","17":"tag-ukraine","18":"tag-war","19":"tag-war-in-ukraine"},"share_on_mastodon":{"url":"https:\/\/pubeurope.com\/@uk\/115942384634254877","error":""},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/714476","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=714476"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/714476\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/714477"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=714476"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=714476"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=714476"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}![\"\"](\"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/01\/251222jf351_03b552b7-2c5b-47d9-bf14-725579cd22a9.jpg\")
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Yuliia stands in front of the bombed-out house next to her temporary accommodation in Kyiv. | Johanna Maria Fritz\/Agentur Ostkreuz for POLITICO<\/p>\n![\"\"](\"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/01\/251222jf093_d6365c68-58d5-4ed3-911a-ee129642b919-1024x819.jpg\")
Yuliia in the room where she is currently living in Kyiv. | Johanna Maria Fritz\/Agentur Ostkreuz for POLITICO<\/p>\n![\"\"](\"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/01\/20251221ak-wams_237A8649_19cfe0bd-741d-437b-9baa-cc4a582540fe-scaled.jpg\")
<\/p>\nVitaly and Bogdan have not seen their partner and mother, Yuliia, since the summer of 2022. | Alex Kraus for POLITICO<\/p>\n![\"\"](\"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/01\/20251221ak-wams_L1020875_238460aa-4c30-408e-adb1-e6dfe0c49672-1024x682.jpg\")
Vitaly and Bogdan in their apartment in Rotenburg an der Fulda, Germany. | Alex Kraus for POLITICO<\/p>\n