Shocking figures: 7.5 million Ukrainians who left the country are the entire population of Kyiv, Kharkiv, Dnipro, Odesa and Lviv

Imagine that all the residents of such megacities as Kyiv, Kharkiv, Dnipro, Odesa and Lviv, one day simply disappeared from the streets, apartments, parks, schools and offices. It is impossible to imagine these empty cities in which only yesterday life was raging. But this is not fiction, but reality for Ukraine. The “FACT” information agency decided to analyze the number of Ukrainians who went abroad, by specific cities and regions of Ukraine.

During his press conference at the “Ukraine 2024. Independence” forum, the President of Ukraine, Volodymyr Zelenskyi, announced a staggering figure: 7.5 million Ukrainians have left the country since the beginning of the war. However, it is worth paying attention to some discrepancies in official data. In its macroeconomic and monetary review for September 2024, the National Bank of Ukraine published another figure – according to their calculations, since the beginning of the year, the number of Ukrainian refugees has reached 6.7 million people. Such a difference in statistical data indicates that there is no general understanding of the situation in the official bodies. However, we still have an impressive picture of mass emigration.

We will proceed from the official statement of the head of state Volodymyr Zelenskyi, which is the highest official source.

According to official data, before the start of the full-scale war, five key regions of Ukraine were inhabited by:

• Kyiv region — 1,795.5 thousand people (including 3.8 million in Kyiv);
• Kharkiv region — 2.66 million people (including Kharkiv — 1.42 million);
• Dnipropetrovsk region — 3,097 million people (including Dnipro — 968,500);
• Odesa region — 2,350 thousand people (including 1,010,537 in the city of Odesa);
• Lviv region — 2.476 million people (including 717 thousand in the city of Lviv).

If we add the number of people who lived in five cities together, we get 7.9 million inhabitants. That is, today there are almost as many people living outside Ukraine as there were before the war in the country’s five leading cities in terms of population.

If we consider the situation in terms of regions, the population of Kyiv, Kharkiv, Dnipropetrovsk, Odesa and Lviv regions was 12.379 million people before the war. That is, 7.5 million Ukrainians who have gone abroad are actually the population of the three largest regions — Kyiv, Kharkiv, and Dnipropetrovsk.

These statistics are not only shocking in their scale, but also make you think about the human destinies behind these numbers: broken families, lost jobs, life in new conditions abroad, adaptation to new realities and, most importantly, uncertainty about the future . Will these people return home after the war? Will they be able to rebuild their lives back where their roots are? These are questions that remain open and for which there are currently no unequivocal answers.

However, one thing is already clear: Ukraine is experiencing one of the largest waves of emigration in its history, and this phenomenon will leave its mark on the country, its economy, demography and, most importantly, its people.