Preface

Although debates over international migration, migrants' lives and their integration have been ongoing for many decades (De Haas et al., 2020), migration concerns in Central and Eastern European (CEE) ¹ countries have not been thoroughly investigated yet. Poverty and political oppression had prompted emigration in these countries for years (Bielewska, 2019; Okólski, 2021), and immigration was a minor phenomenon. The fall of the Soviet Union and the war in former Yugoslavia in the 1990s resulted in migration movements to CEE countries, and when they joined the EU, the ratio of emigrants and immigrants began to change, and a migration transition occurred, with a migration balance shifting from negative to positive (Bielewska, 2019; Okólski, 2021). The Russian aggression on Ukraine in 2014 resulted in the displacement of approximately 1.5 million Ukrainians (Mikheieva & Kuznetsova, 2023), and following the outbreak of Russia-Ukraine war in February 2022, next 12 million Ukrainians were forced to cross international borders, many of whom sought asylum in the neighbouring CEE countries (UNHCR, 2024).