Demographic disaster:12 million Ukrainians work as immigrants abroad!
Taras Berezovets, a Ukrainian political consultant, owner of Berta Communications PLC and CEO at Kiev urban bureau (KUB), wrote on Facebook that the most important problem for Ukraine is, increasingly, its tremendous depopulation. Since the collapse of the USSR there has been a massive emigration of its inhabitants to find work in other countries, and this is continuing.
He said that he had met an Ukrainian minister who, from his calculations, concluded that at least 12 million Ukrainians work abroad, 3.5 million of them in Russia, not counting those living in Donbass and Crimea (Ukraine’s total population is about 44 million). According to the minister migrants were formerly mainly residents of central and western Ukraine, but now most migrants are from the south – Nikolayev and Cherson.
“The problem is snowballing but in the Rada and in the government they are asleep. It is no longer possible to stop this outflow (due to the enormous difference in wages). What can be done is to think about how to reduce it.” He noted in addition that the foreign exchange inflow from immigrants is decreasing. “If, previously, any travel bus transferred from migrants to their relatives in Ukraine 30-40 thousand euros in cash, this has now dropped to 3-4 thousand. Why? There are no relatives to send it to, because the people have migrated with all their family, taking their children with them” Berezovets points out.
