BERN. Switzerland refused protection status S to 286 people from western Ukraine between 1 November 2025 and the end of September 2026, and ordered them to leave. The State Secretariat for Migration gave the figure to the NZZ am Sonntag. Of the 286, 123 were minors. The secretariat is at pains to add that none of those children was removed alone. Each went with a parent or another carer.
The number is the first full count of a policy parliament ordered and the government switched on a year ago. Since 1 November 2025, people from seven western regions have, as a rule, had no claim to status S, the fast protection Switzerland opened at the start of the full-scale war. The regions are Volyn, Rivne, Lviv, Ternopil, Transcarpathia, Ivano-Frankivsk and Chernivtsi. Lutsk, in Volyn, has been hit hard in recent strikes. People from that city still fall on the wrong side of the list.
What status S is, and what the list took away
Status S was built for speed. It let Ukrainians stay, work and send children to school without a full asylum interview in the first weeks of the war. The Friedli motion, passed in the winter session of 2024, told the government to distinguish parts of Ukraine where return was still reasonable. The secretariat drew the line at those seven regions, for new applications and for files already open but not yet decided.
An official tally at the end of February, published in April, showed how slowly the first months moved. Of 573 people then caught by the rule, 104 had a removal decision, 20 cases were still at the Federal Administrative Court, and 20 others were granted protection because of their individual circumstances. By the end of September the removal count had reached 286. The direction did not change. The volume did.
Why a strike does not move the map
The secretariat’s test is deliberately not a headline test. It told the newspaper that individual Russian attacks, even when they kill civilians or destroy buildings, do not automatically make return to a region unreasonable. There is no fixed number of strikes, and no fixed number of dead, that flips a region from one column to the other. What counts is an overall judgement, reviewed from time to time.
That is the sentence critics have seized on. Fabian Molina, a Social Democrat in the National Council, called the policy “a symbol of brutality” and said it was being carried out “on the backs of children, as we can now see.” The west of Ukraine, he said, is not safe and has not been safe since the war began. “Anyone who claims otherwise should go and travel the country.” He wants status S restored for every Ukrainian.
The centre-right answer is the one parliament already voted for. Pascal Schmid, the Thurgau SVP parliamentarian who handles the party’s asylum brief, points to the distance between those regions and the front, and to the cost of a status he says is abused. The Free Democrats are on the same side of the line. A fresh grant of status S to the whole country is not what the secretariat is preparing. On Friday Bern was arranging a different set of returns, under the Dublin rules, to Italy. Sunday’s figure is about a list drawn inside Ukraine, not about a border with the European Union.
What the figure does not yet say
A removal decision is not the same thing as a journey completed, and the Sunday papers do not publish how many of the 286 had left by a set date, how many were still appealing, and how many had gone on their own. The February snapshot showed a system with files stuck on medical questions and on documents. That friction has not been repealed by a rounder number.
For families already here, the practical line is the one the secretariat keeps repeating. Origin in one of the seven regions is the starting presumption, not the end of the file. Individual circumstances can still produce a grant, as the 20 positive decisions by February showed. What they cannot produce, on the secretariat’s current reading, is a rule that one ruined street in Lutsk rewrites the map. The 123 minors make that reading harder to defend in a sentence. They do not, by themselves, change the motion parliament passed.