‘Getting a visa is harder than fleeing war’
After saving a friend’s children from Ukraine, Jo Cope faces a new trial, says Helen Brown
‘The kind of warm welcome we got in Europe, we’ve not had here in Britain’
Four days after leaving her parents behind in Ukraine, 14-year-old Sacha* wept after she finally climbed into bed in Dublin. Russian shells had been exploding around her village in the small hours of February 25, when her frantic father, Ivan, texted a friend in Essex, pleading with her to travel to a Polish border point and take his young charges – Sacha, her eightyear-old brother Aleks and their 15-year-old cousin, Anna – to safety.
The second that Jo Cope – a 35-yearold single mother-of-three in Chelmsford, Essex – received Ivan’s text, she booked herself on the next flight out to a remote airport in eastern Poland, from where she could make her way to Ukraine’s border to collect the three children. They had journeyed to the crossing in the snow, carrying just a small rucksack each, their birth certificates – and a laminated legal document giving Cope legal guardianship of them for one year.
After their extraordinary rescue was first reported in The Telegraph last week, donations to Cope’s Justgiving fundraising page surpassed £50,000.
But reaching the children was the easy bit. Thanks to the ongoing shambles with the Home Office’s visa scheme for Ukrainian refugees – which, within two days of its launch last week, saw just 50 people granted visas, despite 13,500 applications – getting the children back to Cope’s Chelmsford home has proven an even greater logistical challenge. She has found herself repeatedly being told that, because the children are not blood relatives, she would not be allowed to enter the UK with them.
In fact, the closest Cope could legally get to Essex was Ireland. On arrival in Dublin, the four of them were collected at the airport by a woman Cope had contacted through an online group called Ireland United for Ukraine.
“This woman [who would like to remain anonymous] was incredibly generous. She invited us to stay in her home. She has a puppy, which was a huge icebreaker and really kept the children occupied. Her own teenage kids gave up their bedrooms for us, and Sacha, Aleks and Anna wolfed down her home-cooked steak and mash.”
That first night, Sacha, 14 – who had taken the lead negotiating the children’s complicated path out of Ukraine – became “very low-spirited”. Cope says: “She lay down on the bed and cried. I lay with her. I used Google Translate to tell her it was OK to be angry and to be sad. I told her she was safe with me. She didn’t reply. She just lay there with tears running down her cheeks.”
The next morning, Cope took the children with her to Dublin’s British Embassy, where she found herself in a Catch-22 situation. “I couldn’t get past the reception desk,” she says. “The security man told us we needed to make an appointment. But we couldn’t make an appointment before submitting a visa application. There was no visa corresponding to our situation, which is why I wanted to make the appointment. It was so frustrating.”
Cope was given a Home Office number to call, but was told the same thing. “At that point, I sat down on the pavement outside the embassy and sobbed. I needed to get the Ukrainian children into my own home where we could all relax a bit. And I needed to get back to my own children.
“Although lots of Irish people were telling me to just cross the border [with Northern Ireland] without waiting for British visas, I’d heard there might be an announcement coming on Friday about kids in our category. So I decided to stay put for another day.” Cope took the kids out for ice cream “to lighten the mood”, then returned to her host’s home where Anna and Aleks watched an animated movie on the Disney Channel, and Sacha returned to her bed to cry.
Cope wasn’t sure how much the girls knew about what is happening in their home country, but was relieved their parents have moved from their bombed-out home village to relative safety: “They’re on their phones a lot, getting updates from their family and looking at news of the war. I’m trying to give them space and privacy until they’re ready to discuss it with me.”
That evening, Cope lost contact with Sacha and Aleks’s parents. “Aleks got upset,” says Cope. “We tried to settle him, but he ran upstairs. I tucked him into bed and stroked his hair until he fell asleep.”
On Friday, Cope found a solicitor who “dropped what he was doing, and kindly got the [legal guardianship] documents translated for me. He made sure everything was official.” However, it didn’t advance their case for visas with the Home Office.
To lift the mood, their host gave them all 50 euros each to go into Dublin and buy some new clothes. “For an hour, they were just having fun, being normal teenagers in Primark,” says Cope. “They strutted around in the changing rooms and laughed. Aleks is obsessed with Minecraft, so we scoured the store for some Minecraft-themed T-shirts, which he loved. He helped carry everything. He’s such a loving, helpful kid. He hasn’t left my side. He’s fully glued to me.”
Because Anna is a passionate student of art history, Cope also took the children to the National Gallery of Ireland. “She got up so close to the paintings, and her face lit up. She could have spent all day there.” When Cope diverted them to a study area, where they were given pencils and paper, the pictures they drew were heartbreaking – “mostly crying kids holding Ukrainian flags”.
At that point – in the absence of an announcement about a change in visa rules from Home Secretary Priti Patel – Cope decided to take matters into her own hands. “I drove into Northern Ireland and got on a ferry from Larne to Cairnryan in Scotland, which took a couple of hours. From there, we got trains to London, and then on to Essex.”
On the 12-hour journey from the west coast of Scotland to Chelmsford, Cope was staggered to check her Justgiving page to see the amount of money donated since the Telegraph article about her efforts had been published: an “overwhelmingly kind” £59,387 from 1,208 donors.
“The money has taken so much pressure off of me,” says Cope. “I can buy beds and mattresses, and afford to feed them without worrying. We can’t all fit into my rented house, so for now my 14-year-old son has had to move in with my mum, and I’m sleeping downstairs on the sofa while I look for something a bit bigger.”
On Tuesday, she was invited to appear on ITV’S This Morning, where presenters Phillip Schofield and Holly Willoughby called on the Government to grant visas for the children. Sacha, Aleks and Anna were “thrilled to go into the TV studio, starstruck by the whole thing”.
Keenly aware she has effectively broken British law to get the children home to safety, Cope hopes that the British Government will do the right thing and grant them visas to enable them to stay with her for the year. She isn’t holding her breath: “The kind of warm welcome we received in Europe,” she says, “we’ve not had that here.”