Depopulation

More than 600,000 Ukrainians left homeland in 2021

1 min read
More than 600,000 Ukrainians left homeland in 2021
Passenger planes sit next to terminals at Kyiv Boryspil International Airport. From 2011 to 2020, 2.6 million Ukrainians left the country. (Boryspil International Airport/Facebook)

In the first 10 months of 2021, more than 600,000 Ukrainians left the country and didn't return, according to monitoring service Opendatabot.

“In total, from 2011 to 2020, 2.6 million Ukrainian citizens did not return to the country,” Opendatabot reported. “According to the indicators of 2021, we can expect that if there is no mass return of Ukrainians home in November-December, the total negative balance for 11 years will be more than 3.3 million people.”

Ukraine has a population of approximately 41-42 million. The government hasn't done a census since 2001.

From 2011 to 2014, Ukraine lost half a million people every year. In 2015, the number of people who left and did not return fell sharply to 16,431 but the outflow picked up again in subsequent years.

Due to Covid-19 pandemic, 2020 saw a temporary reversal of this trend, with a positive migration balance of 80,000 people.

High emigration rates lead to depopulation in Ukraine. According to the recent United Nations estimates, if the outbound flow of citizens continues at the same pace, Ukraine will lose nearly one-fifth of its population by 2050.

To lure Ukrainian expatriates back to the country, President Volodymyr Zelensky has said he would put in a slew of initiatives, including affordable loans and dual citizenships.

Avatar
Victoria Petryk

News reporter

Victoria Petryk is a staff writer at the Kyiv Independent. She studied philology at Kyiv National Linguistic University. She worked at the Embassy of Israel in Kyiv as an information officer before joining the Kyiv Post as a staff writer in October 2021.

Read more
News Feed

U.S. President Donald Trump's remarks come after the Financial Times (FT) reported, citing undisclosed sources, that he asked President Volodymyr Zelensky whether Kyiv could strike Moscow or St Petersburg if provided with long-range U.S. weapons.

"The stolen data includes confidential questionnaires of the company's employees, and most importantly, full technical documentation on the production of drones, which was handed over to the relevant specialists of the Ukrainian Defense Forces," a source in Ukraine's military intelligence told the Kyiv Independent.

Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orban called upon the EU to take action against Ukraine's conscription practices in an interview with Origo published on July 15, amid an ongoing dispute with Kyiv over the death of a Ukrainian conscript of Hungarian ethnicity.

Show More