Confusion and uncertainty is what an Oxfordshire couple are facing to help family members who have fled war-torn Ukraine to apply for visas.
Mark Ball and his wife Yuliya, a Ukrainian national, currently live in Didcot; last week, they travelled to the Polish border to meet Julia’s elderly parents, and started the challenging process that are visa applications.
Mrs Ball is happy and glad her parents, who have health issues - her mother has a heart condition, and her father is blind - are now safe.
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She said: “I’m lucky my parents are here. Waiting for them has been difficult. It was quite a dangerous trip. They were going through fields around a military conflict zone. It wasn’t a straightforward route.
“I’m very happy they made it. Leaving was a very brave decision for them to make. Now that they are here, that they have rested, they are happy we are all reunited.”
After the elderly couple arrival to the Polish border in the early hours of March 4, Mrs Ball and her husband made the visa applications on that same afternoon.
With the biometrics submitted, like pictures and fingerprints, they are now waiting for a decision.
Mr Ball said: “We were told at the visa centre that it would be 72hrs before the decision was taken.
“At the moment we are hold up in a hotel in Poland. Julias parents are safe, which is great, but we can only stay here for so long.”
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Mr Ball explained that most people like them who are applying for visas, are unsure about the process and how long it will take to get them approved.
He said: “At the visa centre most people were not sure how the visa application process worked. People would turn up with appointments and then appointment system was abandoned. There were people there who had tried to submit applications the previous day but had been turned away. Nobody knew what was going on at all.
“Then we got news from the UK that they’ve granted so far 300 applications out of a total of over 17,000. We started thinking that it would be unlikely that we get the visas.”
With an uncertain future, the family’s goal at the moment is to find sanctuary in the UK, stay safe and together.
"They are not trying to get settlement in the UK, they are just trying to escape the war. Hopefully, in the near future, things will normalise, and they’ll go back. But we haven’t really talked about the future, we are just trying to get everybody safe.”
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