Most Europeans want their governments to have more control over their borders to tackle migration, polling across 23 EU countries shows. Seventy-one percent of respondents agreed that “the European Union needs to allow member states much greater control of their own borders, so that countries can better manage immigration,” according to a survey of 11,714 people across Europe that was carried out by strategic communications firm FGS Global and shared exclusively with POLITICO. The findings highlight countries’ skepticism of the EU’s migration coordination, an area long defined by bickering and finger-pointing, at a time when Brussels is working on major reforms to bolster protection of the bloc’s external borders and increase support for countries that receive the bulk of arrivals.  Yet a move away from EU-level coordination and toward national border control could undermine Europe’s flagship passport-free travel zone, the Schengen area. Countries in the Schengen area — 25 of which are in the EU, while four aren’t — have committed to remove checks on internal borders. While it is possible to temporarily reintroduce controls as a last-resort response to a serious threat, that’s supposed to be limited to six-month periods, which can only be extended to up to two years. Since 2025, 12 EU governments have notified the European Commission they are imposing temporary border controls, eight of which listed migration as a motive for doing so. Some countries have in practice had border checks in place for years. EU ministers met in Cyprus last week to hash out how to halt migration across the EU’s internal borders to protect Schengen. The continued existence of the check-free travel zone “relies on trust and shared responsibility,” Cypriot Justice Minister Costas Fytiris said. That question of shared responsibility has long haunted EU migration debates, which weigh the pressure on countries that receive the bulk of arriving migrants, such as Italy and Greece, against the impact on countries elsewhere in the bloc as a result of secondary movements, i.e. onward travel from the EU country where migrants first arrive. “It’s all about responsibility on the one hand, from those countries that are at the external border. But also solidarity on the other side; from the member states which are affected by secondary movements,” Migration Commissioner Magnus Brunner told POLITICO. Yet the challenge of finding an EU-level answer to immigration management remains. Throughout preparations for the first so-called solidarity pool, a framework that seeks to better share the migration burden among EU countries, governments have disagreed about who owes whom what. Support for “frontline” states such as Italy and Greece can come in the form of financial contributions or relocations — with several countries, including Belgium and Sweden, already ruling out relocations. Belgium’s Migration Minister Anneleen Van Bossuyt told POLITICO that Belgium’s initial solidarity contribution had already been lowered to €12.9 million and that the country is in talks with Italy and Greece to figure out “how we can account for historical [secondary] movements and see whether we can further lower that amount,” she said. With many countries now focused on the migratory implications of the EU’s signature borderless travel area, Luxembourg has become something of a lone Schengen crusader. The country “regrets” that the debates about Europe’s free-travel area and migration have become so intertwined, Home Affairs Minister Léon Gloden told POLITICO. “Schengen is much more than just migration.” Secondary movements aren’t a Schengen problem, he argued — they only mean that the bloc needs to cooperate better and strengthen controls on its external borders. “The illegal migration does not take place between Luxembourg and Germany,” Gloden said. The small country has lodged a complaint against migration-linked checks on Germany’s borders, which have landed the thousands of commuters that enter Luxembourg on a daily basis in major traffic jams. When the Schengen zone was built, it was “not linked to migration … [It] should facilitate the free movement of people, not hinder [it],” he said. FGS interviewed 11,714 adults from 23 European Union countries between Nov. 10 and Nov. 23, 2025. A minimum of 500 interviews were conducted in each of the following countries: Austria, Belgium, Bulgaria, Croatia, Czechia, Denmark, Finland, France, Germany, Greece, Hungary, Ireland, Italy, Latvia, Lithuania, Netherlands, Poland, Portugal, Romania, Slovakia, Slovenia, Spain and Sweden. Interviews were conducted online and the data was weighted to be nationally representative of each country by gender, age, income, region and socio-economic group. Data from a nationally representative poll of 500 adults is accurate to a margin of error of +/- 4.4 percent at 95 percent confidence.

SEPARATED BY WAR — AND BY SCHENGEN Designed to keep Europe safe, a security system is trapping Ukrainian ex-prisoners — including victims of Russian occupation — leaving families torn apart with no clear path out of legal limbo. By EKATERINA BODYAGINA Yuliia Hetman, 35, holds a photograph of her son Bogdan in the room where she is temporarily living in Kyiv. | Johanna Maria Fritz/Agentur Ostkreuz for POLITICO Vitaly and Bogdan Osipov found refuge from Russia’s full-scale invasion in central Germany, but for nearly two years the father and son have been waiting for Yuliia Hetman — Vitaly’s partner and Bogdan’s mother — to join them. What keeps the family apart is no longer the war itself, but a European Union database.  The family is among a growing number of Ukrainians caught in a trap created by the bloc’s security architecture. Ukrainian nationals serving sentences in Ukrainian prisons seized by Russian forces — or who were forcibly transferred to Russia by occupying forces during the war — are being flagged in the EU’s Schengen Information System as potential threats to public order and internal security. Advertisement 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. “These people survived war, abduction and abuse in Russian detention,” said Hanna Skrypka, a lawyer at the Kyiv-based NGO Protection of Prisoners of Ukraine. “They are victims of war crimes — not security threats.” 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. Vitaly Osipov, 48, and his son Bogdan, 13, found refuge in the central German town of Rotenburg an der Fulda. | Alex Kraus for POLITICO While Ukrainian authorities say they made no requests to flag individuals in the EU’s Schengen Information System, former detainees, rights groups and lawyers say the information-sharing coincided with a surge in entry bans — separating families and leaving former prisoners trapped by opaque security decisions they cannot meaningfully challenge. “We should be very careful not to treat Ukrainians from temporarily occupied territories as a security threat by default,” said Thijs Reuten, a Dutch center-left MEP and the European Parliament’s shadow rapporteur on Ukraine. “Ukrainians are our allies — they are fighting for their freedom and for democracy.” “Once someone is on a list,” continued Reuten, “who is accountable for getting them off?”  FROM A BESIEGED PRISON TO A CLOSED BORDER Hetman was three years into a five-year sentence, for causing bodily harm to a man she says assaulted her, when women’s 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. “We suspected something was happening, but didn’t know what exactly,” she recalled. 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’s assault on Mariupol, Russian forces took control of the city’s women’s prison — subjecting the Ukrainian prisoners held there to a harsher regime marked by forced labor and arbitrary rules. Yuliia stands in front of the bombed-out house next to her temporary accommodation in Kyiv. | Johanna Maria Fritz/Agentur Ostkreuz for POLITICO “Life changed completely,” Hetman says. “For the smallest violation, everyone was punished.” Forty kilometers away, Osipov and his son were hiding in the basement of their neighbors’ house, near the home where the family had lived together before Yuliia’s imprisonment — surviving on canned food they cooked over open fires. Neither partner knew the other was alive.  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. Osipov explained to a Russian soldier at the gate that Hetman had been imprisoned inside. The soldier let him enter. “We saw each other and burst into tears,” recalled Osipov. Advertisement 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 — and waited. Then, early one morning, Hetman called from the Ukrainian-Polish border, crying. “They won’t let me in,” she said, according to Osipov’s recollection.  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.  INSIDE THE DATABASE THAT SEPARATED A UKRAINIAN FAMILY Europe’s guaranteed freedom of movement relies on a database. The Schengen Information System joins the bloc’s 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. How and why individuals are entered into the Schengen Information System can be difficult to trace — 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. Advertisement Information relevant to SIS alerts may be shared via Europol, the EU’s 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. Hetman’s 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’s name later appeared in the Schengen Information System “for the purpose of refusing entry,” according to a Polish border refusal decision reviewed by POLITICO. The alert appears to have originated in Germany. The country’s 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’s Office for Foreigners shows that Poland did not play a role.) Germany’s 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. Yuliia in the room where she is currently living in Kyiv. | Johanna Maria Fritz/Agentur Ostkreuz for POLITICO Polish border guards told POLITICO that they see only the identifying data and the instruction to refuse entry — not the reasons for the listing — 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. The structure leaves responsibility fragmented: Information flows across borders, but decision-making and accountability remain national — 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. 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. Advertisement Europol confirmed to POLITICO that it processes “operational data” 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. In a written reply to POLITICO, Ukraine’s Prosecutor General’s Office said it is overseeing criminal investigations into the deportation and forcible transfer of Ukrainians from occupied territories to Russia or Crimea — 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. “Why Ukrainian authorities passed the list to Europol, we don’t know,” said Skrypka, whose Kyiv-based NGO supports Ukrainian prisoners and documents abuses linked to Russian aggression. “What does Europol have to do with it?” HOW A SCHENGEN ALERT FOLLOWS UKRAINIANS ACROSS BORDERS 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. 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 — as in Hetman’s case — by German authorities. Advertisement In a written response reviewed by POLITICO, Czech police said Soldatov is not listed in the country’s national register of “undesirable persons” 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.  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 that standard by instead using automatic or collective groupings, like the generalized suspicion attached to the label “former prisoner.” 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. Vitaly and Bogdan have not seen their partner and mother, Yuliia, since the summer of 2022. | Alex Kraus for POLITICO Germany’s 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. However, neither Germany’s 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. “Once a name starts circulating through law-enforcement channels, it can be very hard to undo,” said de Suremain, who represents several former Ukrainian prisoners before the European Court of Human Rights. Advertisement 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’s 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. 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. WHEN SECURITY SYSTEMS LEAVE NO SAFE ROUTE 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. For Ukrainians released from Russian prisons, legal exit routes are limited. Reaching Ukraine typically requires traversing Russia’s western borders, including into Schengen states such as Norway, Finland, Estonia or Latvia — where former prisoners flagged in the Schengen system are turned away even when seeking only onward travel back to Ukraine.  Passage through Belarus, meanwhile, remains an option only for those with valid Ukrainian passports — documents many former prisoners no longer have. Eastern Ukraine remains an active war zone. Advertisement 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–Georgian border — including transit refusals or prolonged administrative detention — 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. “People cannot reunite with their families — and they cannot even get home safely,” said Skrypka. “SIS entry bans affect both.” THE LONG WAIT 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 — and prepares lunch for the next day. “At work, phones are forbidden except during breaks. I call Bogdan immediately,” Osipov says. “My heart bleeds knowing he’s alone all day.” Vitaly and Bogdan in their apartment in Rotenburg an der Fulda, Germany. | Alex Kraus for POLITICO They haven’t seen Hetman since the summer of 2022. “My son asks every day when his mother will come,” Osipov says. “I have no answer.” 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.“This is a special situation that needs to be dealt with in a special way,” said Reuten, the European Parliament’s shadow rapporteur on Ukraine. “Otherwise, we risk separating people from their families for years during wartime — and that is unacceptable.”

Political posturing over migration has delivered yet another blow to Europe’s beleaguered free-travel zone. Faced with right-wing demands at home to control the flow of people arriving from outside the EU’s borders, the leaders of Poland and Germany are seeking easy wins which might placate populists — but put the once-sacred Schengen area on life support. Warsaw’s patience with Germany sending migrants back to Poland “is becoming exhausted,” Polish Prime Minister Donald Tusk said, as he announced the imposition of checks on his country’s borders with Germany and Lithuania from July 7. Almost four decades after the introduction of the borderless travel area that encompasses 450 million people from 29 countries — four of which aren’t in the EU — supposedly temporary border controls in the name of exceptional security concerns are increasingly the norm, creating the impression Schengen exists more in name than in substance. But with the rise of far-right parties and several years of migration from Ukraine — and before that, the Middle East — carveouts to the border-free zone rules have become an easy solution for politicians looking to show they mean action. “We consider the introduction of controls necessary,” Tusk said, pointing the finger at Germany’s “unilateral” action. In May, the conservative-led government of Chancellor Friedrich Merz ramped up checks on Germany’s borders, including with Poland, following pressure from Berlin’s own opposition party, the far-right Alternative for Germany (AfD). Warsaw’s patience with Germany sending migrants back to Poland “is becoming exhausted,” Polish Prime Minister Donald Tusk said. | Rafal Guz/EPA German police will turn away more undocumented immigrants, including asylum seekers, Merz said. The move further bolstered border controls the previous government had already put in place October 2023. The crackdown riled Germany’s neighbors, including Poland, despite Merz’s promises to step up Berlin’s relationship with Warsaw — an alliance he considers key for driving a united European defense policy. While politicians have warned Germany’s controls could chip away at the free movement of people and goods within the Schengen area, critics have also called the border measures largely symbolic. Poland’s Fakt newspaper said that German authorities returned 1,087 people to Poland between May 1 and June 15 this year, pointing out that those numbers aren’t significantly different from last year’s. According to German police union figures, the new checks led to 160 asylum applicants being rejected in the first four weeks. It’s a small fraction of total refusals — on average, up to 1,300 people per week are rejected for lacking the necessary documentation. Germany’s move, however, has created a political problem for Tusk’s ruling centrist Civic Coalition. Having narrowly lost the presidential election to the populist Law and Justice (PiS) party, it’s feeling the hot breath of rightwing opposition parties that want a tougher stance on migration. Civic Coalition and PiS are currently neck-and-neck in POLITICO’s Poll of Polls and the hard-right Confederation has surged since the last general election in 2023. All 3 Years 2 Years 1 Year 6 Months Smooth Kalman Polish civilian vigilante groups tied to right-wing parties are staging patrols along the frontier with Germany. “Poland’s western border is ceasing to exist,” Mariusz Błaszczak, a senior PiS politician, warned last week. He blamed Tusk’s “servility toward Berlin.” Sławomir Mentzen, a Confederation leader, accused the Polish Border Guard of cooperating with Germany in accepting illegal migrants. The government has denounced those attacks. “Don’t play politics with Poland’s security. This is not the time or place for such actions,” Tomasz Siemoniak, Poland’s interior minister, said on X.  Poland’s retaliatory controls have also put Merz’s border policy in the firing line, with Germany’s left-wing opposition painting Warsaw’s decision as a clear setback. “This is a devastating signal for a German government and a ‘foreign chancellor’ Merz, who promised to regain trust in Europe,” Chantal Kopf, a lawmaker for the Greens, told POLITICO. Knut Abraham, a member of Merz’s conservatives and the government’s coordinator for the German-Polish relationship, in an interview with Welt also warned against lasting checks. While they are “necessary as a political signal that migration policy in Germany has changed … the solution cannot be to push migrants back and forth between Poland and Germany or to cement border controls on both sides,” he said. Merz on Tuesday defended Germany’s border checks. “We naturally want to preserve this Schengen area, but freedom of movement in the Schengen area will only work in the long term if it is not abused by those who promote irregular migration, in particular by smuggling migrants,” he said.