Dr Rob Sharp, Lecturer in Media and Cultural Studies in the School of Media, Arts and Humanities, University of Sussex

It has now been well over two years since Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine in February 2022. As of February 2024, nearly 6.4 million Ukrainian refugees had been recorded globally. As the war has progressed, the European Union’s support for displaced Ukrainians has generated significant public debate, not least due to the conflict’s heightened and prolonged demands on member states’ public infrastructure and associated economic cost, necessarily of concern and interest to the public. This concern comes after a widespread outpouring of support from private individuals, companies and non-governmental organisations.

If we take solidarity to comprise a negotiation between two individuals around shared values, with clear emotional, legal and sociocultural dimensions, then the question of solidarity fatigue in relation to those responding to the war – those in institutions and private individuals offering help with accommodation, integration, language, or financial help – has generated significant press and academic interest. The European Commission’s Ukraine adviser Lodewijk Asscher has suggested its major cause is economic slowdown relating to cost-of-living crisis. One might expect solidarity fatigue to particularly hit Germany and Poland most prominently, given that these two countries have hosted the largest number of Ukrainian refugees since the invasion, around a million in each country respectively, according to some reports.

As a Media and Cultural Studies researcher, I am particularly interested in the discursive and communicative justificatory strategies used when expressions of fatigue are articulated by those at the heart of offering solidarity – small NGOs, self-organised community organisers and employees of cultural institutions. I completed 45 interviews in January through April 2024 with such individuals in Berlin and Warsaw, many of whom were displaced Ukrainians, as part of an ongoing project funded by the British Academy and Leverhulme Trust in order to understand such questions of solidarity further, not least in an effort to critically interrogate successful attempts at maintaining solidarity long-term in respect to such crises.

In May 2024 I organised workshops in Ukrainian run by the Ukrainian artists Dasha Podoltseva and Elena Orap at the centre for urbanism ZK/U in Mitte, Berlin and in Collegium Civitas in central Warsaw. Up to 15 displaced Ukrainian women based in each city attended in each workshop, where a series of object, photographic and map-elicitation activities were used – with strong ethical consideration – to explore specifically the question of recognition or its opposite – not just solidarity, but also legal-rights-based and affective alternatives. Participants explored where, for instance, in each city they felt recognised or otherwise – showing much more of an affinity to Warsaw’s identity as a reconstructed city, as opposed to the post-Soviet architecture of East Berlin. Clearly memories of the city’s railway stations are still raw and being rearticulated in different ways.

Via these different methodologies, and as I proceed with writing up my analysis, there have been numerous complex articulations around solidarity fatigue – as the cultural and political climate has shifted, as rights have evolved in both jurisdictions, and as complex affective and emotional responses between people have needed to be renegotiated over time as the full-scale invasion wears on.

In Berlin, multiple interviewees referred in general terms to the changing media and political climate as attitudes towards the crisis have evolved. As you might expect, many NGO employees highlighted a shift from a short-term emergency response targeting health and accommodation to longer-term questions of integration and socioeconomic inclusion, alongside rearticulating a changed understanding of the duration of the war, which was originally widely believed to be temporary but is now perceived by many interviewees to be indefinite. The original positive reception of Ukrainians by institutional media has changed to something more ambivalent. Such media discourses are often used as a justificatory articulation of solidarity fatigue.

In Berlin, it was clear that caveats have been introduced among some independent citizens over time in order to justify their withdrawal in some cases from providing solidarity. This is manifested through what might be called a kind of associative solidarity with particular caveats – whereby solidarity is extended to members of a particular groups but not to others – that reproduce the boundaries around the German liberal nation-state (Straehle, 2020). It is also indicative of selective solidarity(Ortiz, 2022), whereby pre-existing values within a population may be used to justify providing support to some groups but refusing others (Steinhilper et al, in press; Lawlor and Tolley, 2017) – with some racial dimensions, including towards those arriving via the ongoing migration crisis at the Polish-Belarusian border.

In Poland, these discursive changes were more overtly politicised. These partly reflect the populist mediated discourses of the Law and Justice Party (PiS) government which lost power in Poland in October 2023, shortly before data gathering for this paper took place. It also reflected changing media narratives over time in Poland resulting from the war’s domestic effects; most notably, the Polish farmers’ protests in 2024 against the European Green Deal and the import of grain from Ukraine.

The NGO Migration Consortium, in a 2023 report on the aftermath of the full-scale invasion produced with colleagues from the University of Warsaw, spoke of burnout being especially pronounced among Ukrainians now embedded within NGOs in Poland. “Refugees from Refugees from Ukraine proved to be extremely committed workers,” reads the report. “They claimed that work was a way for them to participate in the war – a field where they could make themselves useful. This very personal, strong motivation was admirable, but at the same time it fostered overworking and job burnout.”

As well as being written up for its own ends, my research is also feeding partly into a series of AHRC-funded workshops with cultural institutions across the UK, hosted at a national institution in Manchester and London in June 2024, with representatives, in an attempt to produce guidance or at least share best practices in sustaining ethical participatory best practices with refugees long-term, from an initial perspective of minimizing misrecognition. While this and the aforementioned data is complex, given its quantity and its skeins of competing dimensions, I am looking forward to sharing and discussing this work in greater detail with colleagues in the coming months. If anyone is interested in discussing individually please do get in touch.