People who left Ukraine from February 24th onwards are eligible for a type of asylum called temporary protection; temporary protection is an exceptional measure to provide immediate and temporary protection to displaced persons from non-EU countries and those unable to return to their country of origin. This is the first time the EU has activated the temporary protection directive which was devised in the early 2000s for situations like these, when there is a large influx of refugees which makes it administratively challenging to effectively process individual asylum applications.
We recommend all people coming from Ukraine to use this to their advantage as this is definitely the fastest and least financially draining way to gain rights to legally work in Croatia, to access free health insurance and enroll into public education. Apart from this, though it is still not completely clear whether people under temporary protection be hired and open businesses under the same conditions as Croatian citizens and other refugees (be it with asylum or under subsidiary protection), right now everything is pointing to the direction that that will be the case, i.e. people with temporary protection will not be burdened with conditions such as investing 200,000 HRK for the beginning capital nor will other employers need to hire an X amount of Croatians in order to hire a person under temporary protection. In spite of the psychological burden that some people might feel having all of a sudden a refugee status ascribed to them, we feel that because of all of the above mentioned reasons, the temporary protection directive is truly a helpful instrument that everyone who can use it should use. If there ever was a time when Croatia could help you not go through a loop of bureaucracy-related challenges, this is it!
Source: Jutarnji list
Here you can find additional useful information composed by the Ministry of Interior and the Red Cross in Ukrainian language, and here you can find fliers in Ukrainian, English and Croatian providing information on free legal aid coming from the Croatian Law Centre (HPC). This is a trusted Facebook group where useful tips, material help and accomodation information is shared to Ukrainians by Croatians. You can find handbooks for learning Croatian, practical guides on living in defferent cities around Croatian and job opportunities.
Below you can find names of other NGOs that have a long history of assisting refugees in Croatia:
Centre for Peace Studies (CMS, Zagreb)
Jesuit Refugee Service (JRS, Zagreb and other cities)
Udruga “Mi” (Split)
The Red Cross (HCK, nationwide)
