While current Ukrainian political leaders are struggling to bring the country into NATO and the European Union, this goal may be jeopardized by lack of clear and well-planned policies regarding racial diversity and migration, which has been increasing in Ukraine.

Ukraine’s own bureaucrats and law enforcement authorities fail “to protect basic human dignity from assault,” according to the research done at Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars in Washington, D.C.

This reputation is obviously not helpful for Ukraine’s attempts to integrate into international alliances.

“Establishing a New Right to the Ukrainian City,” by Blair A. Ruble and a group of scholars at the Wilson Center and Kennan Institute in Washington D.C., has been released recently.

The research report focused on the life of migrants in the three major Ukrainian gateway cities of Kyiv, Kharkiv and Odesa.

In the last decade, thousands of people from the Caucasus, Afghanistan and Iraq fled to Ukraine from military conflicts in their home countries. In addition, a number of traders from Vietnam, China and Africa moved to Ukraine in search of a better life. Transitional migrants are present in neighborhoods of major Ukrainian cities, including Troeshchyna in Kyiv, Barabashova Market in Kharkiv, and Odesa’s Seven Kilometer Market.

These areas have changed significantly because of the increased racial diversity. The Seven Kilometer Market is larger than the Mall of America in Minnesota, according to research, and the scale of changes is important for Ukraine.

How are these migrants entering into the mainstream of Ukrainian life? The experts organized focus groups in Kyiv, Kharkiv and Odesa to gain insight into the migrant communities.

In Kyiv, gang attacks by local “skinheads” on migrants of color are a major concern, certainly to the victims and others in their minority communities.

A series of violent murders triggered response from international organizations and embassies in Kyiv. For example, in June 2008, there were two killings a week apart, one of a Nigerian migrant and another of a Congolese laborer.

The official response did not give much hope to the migrants. Ukrainian Interior Minister Yuri Lutsenko, an ally of Orange Revolution hero President Victor Yushchenko, said last summer: “You may call me a racist, but I will not allow Kyiv to be turned into another Kharkiv or Odesa!”

The researchers found that Kyiv has become a more antagonistic environment for foreign migrants, “even in comparison with other large Ukrainian cities such as Kharkiv and Odesa.”

The migrants told researchers last July that that they receive “constant attention” from police officers, “whom they characterized as only being interested in receiving bribes. They [the police] don’t know the laws themselves. They don’t know what documents a foreigner needs. If they see a foreigner with money in his pocket they only think about how to get that money,” a participant of the discussion said.

In Kharkiv, foreign migrants are more integrated into local life than in the capital city. They often arrive to study and remain there after marrying Ukrainian women. However, “tensions are high between migrants and the police, who are viewed as parasies feeding off of the legal ambiguities of migrant life in Ukraine,” the research says. A respondent, who used to live at the border between Pakistan and Afghanistan, said that “Skinheads” are more dangerous than the situation in his homeland, because at home he could go around with weapon and now he can’t defend himself. Another respondent, originally from Pakistan, reported that he was refused treatment at health clinic in Kharkiv, because the doctor had fought in Afghanistan many years ago and “Pakistan hadn’t fought on his side.”

The Odesa focus group participants described a far more hospitable environment with a higher degree of good will than their peers in Kyiv and Kharkiv. The city, being a large sea port, has always been full of foreigners and foreign students. In general, the migrants, participating in research, “feel an attachment to Odesa that is absent in the conversations in Kyiv and Kharkiv.”

Ukraine has become integrated into global society faster than was ever predicted.

Although this situation brings new challenges, the rich diversity of the Ukrainian migrant community can also be viewed as an opportunity to use the professionals who came from abroad in pursuit of affordable education and were taught at the local engineering and medical schools.

The country is obviously taking steps to build a democracy, one of which includes exercising the right to freedom of speech. However, “the visible willingness of national and local authorities to tolerate bureaucrats and police who are corrupt and senior officials who mock racism undermines whatever democratically-inspired institutional and constitutional arrangements are taking shape,” according to Ruble’s report.