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Drawing on a series of interviews with four Ukrainian refugee women in Berlin, this essay employs the lens of emotions to discern which integration opportunity structures shape their settlement, and how they do so. To capture the latter, we approach settlement as a process of anchoring. The prism of emotions enables us to grasp Ukrainian refugee women’s subjective and often contradictory orientations towards their settlement trajectories in Berlin, all while discerning how these are informed by social as well as policy-and place-related opportunity structures. The German implementation of the EU Temporary Protection Directive is relevant here, as well as familial relations. Though integration opportunity structures on the local, national and transnational levels all play into these refugees’ settlement, we observe that these structures do not either facilitate or hinder the refugees’ anchoring, but that anchoring processes are tightly interwoven with un-anchoring ones, and that both can change over time. This exploratory essay highlights both the non-instrumental role of familial relations in refugee settlement as well as the malleable, multi-layered, and multi-directional character of settlement processes.