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Switzerland keeps special protection for Ukraine refugees

Ukrainian refugees playing
Ukrainians from the region of Marioupol play in a courtyard in Gilly in the canton of Vaud. © Keystone / Jean-christophe Bott

Switzerland will continue to offer special protection to Ukrainian refugees.

This was decided by the Federal Council at its meeting on Wednesday.

A sustainable stabilisation of the situation in Ukraine is not foreseeable, writes the Federal Council. The S protection status will therefore not be lifted before March 4, 2025.

Status S has been in effect since March 12, 2022, when the Federal Council activated it due to Russia’s war of aggression against Ukraine. It serves as temporary protection for the duration of a serious general threat. At the end of October 2023, about 66,000 people from Ukraine had an active S status in Switzerland.

The government has also defined a target for integration into the labor market for the first time: 40% of employable women and men with Status S should be in work by the end of 2024.

This news story has been written and carefully fact-checked by an external editorial team. At SWI swissinfo.ch we select the most relevant news for an international audience and use automatic translation tools such as DeepL to translate it into English. Providing you with automatically translated news gives us the time to write more in-depth articles. You can find them here

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