Report from the Academy of Romani Studies 7

On behalf of the Institute, the event was attended by the director of the Institute, Tatiana Zachar Podolinská, who opened the conference, Andrej Belák, who presented a paper entitled Advantages and disadvantages of helping to Roma – a comparison of approaches during the Covid-19 pandemic and the war in Ukraine, and the main organizer, Tomáš Hrustič, who moderated the academic section. The central theme was the war in Ukraine and its impact on Roma, specifically on Roma refugees in Slovakia and Czech Republic. The conference was opened with a unique testimony of the Roma academic Janusz Panchenko from the Faculty of History and Archaeology of Zaporozhye University, who gave an overview of the situation in the occupied Kherson region and analysed the reasons for the different waves of migration from these territories since the outbreak of the war. The conference also included two panel discussions with different actors, mostly Roma, who worked directly on the border and in the field with Roma refugees and conveyed their own, often very emotional experiences of helping Roma refugees, who, as reality showed, were treated with double standards. The academic session reflected on the situation of Roma refugees in the Czech Republic and Slovakia, and the 2022 Roma Studies Academy was thus the first more comprehensive reflection (both academic and practical) on the experiences related to the situation of Roma refugees from war-affected Ukraine.