As soon as you arrive in Valencia from the North Station, three white vans and a long queue sneak into the landscape that is painted next to the green fence. Because their information is printed in Cyrillic script, few of the many who pass by understand that those are three mobile units of the Ministry of the Interior of Ukraine and its Migration Service for the processing of international passports, among other documents.
Yes, the hundreds of Ukrainians who are queuing these days to update their documentation before the end of the year do. They put themselves on hold at nine in the morning and until six in the afternoon they hope to be lucky and be attended to. If not, they will return tomorrow. Like Natalia, who lives in Girona, but has been in Valencia for two days to update her official documentation and that of her daughters and her husband. The four arrived on Wednesday at seven in the morning. They expected to be seen the same day, but they didn't get it and ended up sleeping in the car.
"It's okay, we Ukrainians are strong and brave," he explains very kindly while clutching the folders with the papers that he hopes to present as soon as possible to his chest. She explains that the cost of the procedure will be about 130 euros per person and that it is urgent for her to be able to travel. Her daughters explain that when they get to the queue they sign up on a list and also enter a Telegram group - where yesterday there were about 300 members - to receive information about how the shift and the procedure are going.
Natalia and her family did not flee from barbarism, as they have been living in Spain for 13 years, but they have their entire family there, many of them in the capital, "where war is seen every day." Just like another married couple, who patiently waits their turn. Coming from closer, from Sagunt, they talk with another couple who has been waiting for three days and who arrived from Orihuela, Alicante. They came and left during the day during the first two days, but on the third night they looked for a hotel. This Thursday they expected to be the last day to update their official documentation.
Sitting there is another couple from Tàrrega, in Lleida, who has also been waiting for two days. And three other young people who have retired to smoke. They say that they live in Barcelona, but they preferred to come to Valencia because the process is more agile although, based on the queues these days, it may not seem that way.
"Now, at the end of the year, is when they have the most work at the consulate general in Barcelona, the consulate in Malaga or the embassy in Madrid, and we, who do not do normal consular procedures, with this service go faster," he explains. the honorary consul of Ukraine in Valencia, Pablo Gil.
The mobile service, managed by the Ukrainian public company Dokument, was implemented in spring, at the request of the Valencian consulate, says Gil, due to the large influx of refugees who came to request help and services, to simplify their stay abroad.
"We learned of the existence of this service in Poland, where in the first days of the war up to four million people arrived, and many did not have documentation because they ran away," he details. Gil recounts how a petition was submitted to the department of the Ministry of the Interior, alleging that "we had the largest community of refugees and that people complained because they had to go to Barcelona to make the arrangements with the risk of not resolving it on the same day." , Add.
"The passport can be made in other places, but the DNI can only be made here in Valencia and we have really helped to make this possible because with 100,000 refugees this service was essential," explains the general coordinator, Eleonora Vatral.
Ukrainians who come to the north station of Valencia can process both the DNI and the international passport, renew it due to expiration or change of data, renew the 1994 model passport, process the international passport and take out an insurance policy, "and Now we have started getting a driver's license," explains Vatral.
In Spain there is this service in Valencia and Madrid, but the Ukrainian population has four other locations in Poland (Warsaw, Krakow, Gdansk and Wroclaw), Turkey (Istanbul), Slovakia (Bratislava), Czechia (Prague) and Germany (Cologne ( Köln) and Berlin) where you can do the same procedure. It is through one of the mobile services in Poland that Natalia, who traveled from Girona, had found out about this option. Yesterday I was patiently waiting for her turn.
