The outflow of people from Ukraine following Russia’s full-scale invasion has significantly increased the size of the Ukrainian global community. Before 2022, that community comprised mostly economic migrants who had left during the period 1990 to 2010, as well as descendants of the Ukrainian diaspora who had left in the 19th and the first half of the 20th centuries. This paper will mainly focus on those Ukrainians who fled the country after Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine on 24 February 2022. While this paper refers to Ukrainian citizens who have fled since 2022 as ‘refugees’, it acknowledges the limitations of the terminology as most Ukrainians who left have received ‘temporary protection status’, which is different from that of an ‘asylum seeker’ or a ‘refugee’ due to its temporary nature. Ukrainians who were granted temporary protection status in the EU and other countries received immediate access to the job market and social support; however, they do not have a right to permanent residency in host countries.
The outflow of people from Ukraine following Russia’s full-scale invasion has significantly increased the size of the Ukrainian global community.
There is conflicting data on the number of Ukrainian refugees who have fled abroad since the invasion. UNHCR provides a figure of 6.3 million Ukrainians in Europe and 6.9 million globally. However, these numbers include official data on Ukrainians from the governments of Russia and Belarus; such data is hard to verify and might be exaggerated. An important caveat is that many Ukrainians, especially children, have been forcibly deported to Russia and are unable to leave. The Ukrainian government’s estimate is higher: in August 2024, President Zelenskyy referred to there being 7.5 million Ukrainian refugees. Eurostat data as of 31 December 2024 indicated that more than 4.2 million people who fled Ukraine had received temporary protection status in the European Union. Hundreds of thousands of Ukrainians are also in non-EU countries, most notably in the UK, the US, Canada, Norway, Switzerland and Moldova. A Kyiv-based think-tank, the Centre for Economic Strategy (CES), which surveyed Ukrainian refugees about their situation and future intentions in four waves of research, puts their number at 5.2 million. It is safe to conclude, therefore, that there are currently more than 5 million Ukrainian refugees in other countries, excluding Russia and Belarus.
The countries hosting the highest numbers of Ukrainian refugees, as of September 2024, were Germany, Poland, Czechia, Canada, the UK, Spain, the US and Italy (in descending order of numbers of refugees hosted). As mentioned, most of the refugees are women and children. Following the February 2022 invasion, martial law was introduced in Ukraine, which prohibited men between the ages of 18 and 60 from leaving the country. Despite the law, the share of adult males among Ukrainian refugees has been growing. According to Eurostat, as of December 2024, 21.5 per cent of beneficiaries of temporary protection status in the EU were males aged from 18 to 64 years; 40.4 per cent were women of the same age group; 31.8 per cent were children under 18; and 6.1 per cent were people aged over 64.
There has been an upward trend in EU temporary protection decisions granted in favour of adult men since the first quarter of 2022, when their proportion constituted only 7.7 per cent of all Ukrainians who received this status. It is unclear how many of these adult men left Ukraine legally, how many bribed their way out or crossed the border illegally, and how many left via Russia (usually the only way to leave the occupied territories of Ukraine).
