The European Union has experienced major crises of massive influx of third-country nationals across its external borders in the last decade alone. The first of these, known as “the peak migration crisis”, took place in 2015, while the second, incomparably larger one in 2022 pretends to be “the peak refugee crisis”. Undoubtedly, both have had an unprecedented impact on the crossing of EU borders and, at the same time, have significantly affected the functioning of the “area without borders”. However, such significant crises have caused a great degree of terminological confusion, concerning the terms refugee and migrant. In addition, the scale of the influx of Ukrainian citizens into the European Union has surpassed any previous numbers that were described as a crisis and which the EU has ever tried to deal with. The aim of this article is to provide a trial of comparative analysis of these phenomena in the context of their impact on the functioning of the “area without borders”.