Eastern Europe Feeds on a Shrinking Ukraine
The anti-immigrant governments of eastern Europe compete for the growing stream of Ukrainian emigre workers.
Where have all the enterprising Ukrainians gone?
Photographer: Sergiy Gudak/AFP/Getty Images
One of the issues complicating the Ukrainian presidential election at the end of March is that no one, including pollsters, knows how many people still live in the country. Waves of Ukrainians have been emigrating and counting them isn’t easy.
Official statistics are deceptively detailed. The latest population count, from December 2018, is 42,177,579. According to the Ukrainian State Statistical Service, there was a sharp drop in population between 2014 and 2015, when Ukraine lost Russian-annexed Crimea and couldn’t run counts in the eastern regions of the country, controlled by Russian proxies. But in recent years, there has been no sharp population decline.