Over 500,000 young people left Ukraine in past six months: MP

More than 500,000 young Ukrainians have fled the country in the past six months, a Ukrainian lawmaker said.

"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," Sergey Nagornyak, a Verkhovna Rada (parliament) member with the ruling Servant of the People party, said in an interview with the Novosti. Live channel.

He noted that there are so many Ukrainians in Poland that "the only thing that differs Warsaw from Kiev is the availability of electricity and heating." Most of those working in the services sector in Warsaw are young Ukrainians, he explained. "Will they return to Ukraine?" he asked rhetorically.

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 said in October 2025 that Ukraine’s population as of early 2025 was from 28 to 30 million. No data for 2025 is available as of yet.
Ukraine has been facing demographic problems since 1991 when it received independence. According to the UN Geneva Office, that country’s population shrank by 8 million from February 2022 through the fall of 2024.