Andrew Pryma, MBA

Andrew Pryma, MBA

January, 2023

Ukraine keeps losing its population, especially after the start of the full-scale invasion.

Ukraine has been in the top three countries for population loss, losing its population rapidly. In the last 20 years, around eight to nine million Ukrainians left the country to find a better place to live. In 2000, the Ukrainian state used to run a commercial with the slogan, “You are not alone, it’s 52 million of us”. Before the war, Ukraine had a population of around 43 million people, give or take. In the last decade, the Ukrainian government has been challenged to create good living and working conditions to incentivize its people to stay. However, last year, the situation became even worse. Due to the Russian invasion, within several months, over eight million people left Ukraine looking for a safe place to live.
The Ukrainian government has a daunting task: how to convince these people to return? After a year abroad, people have settled down, found jobs, learned languages, and gotten used to living in countries that are democratically and economically advanced and are not thinking about returning, especially when people have no home to return to with their cities destroyed by bombings.
Zelenskyy’s office needs a solution focused on attracting people to return. The most attractive criteria would be new jobs, the rule of law, and reconstruction guarantees for destroyed homes and cities. If Ukraine creates hundreds of thousands of jobs to rebuild the country, uses the $500B in confiscated Russian assets responsibly, and attracts more money from its Western allies, there might be a chance to accomplish this goal. However, the Ukrainian people and the Western allies need guarantees that these billions of dollars will be used to rebuild the country and not to buy yachts or be stashed in a mattress.