The pro-Kremlin sources cited a member of the Ukrainian parliament from the Opposition Platform for Life party, who in the past was under scrutiny for allegedly funding separatism in Ukraine.
But the investigation by StopFake shows that the 10 million figure is grossly inflated. According to the director of the Migration Department at Ukrainian National Academy of Sciences Oleksiy Pozniak, some two to four million Ukrainians have emigrated in recent years. Moreover, according to Pozniak, people leave purely for economic reasons – an assessment that is confirmed by a 2017 poll, which showed that 64% of Ukrainians considering emigration name economic reasons as their primary motivation. Less than 1% said that they would consider emigrating because of political reasons and national values.
It is not clear where the figure of 10 million Ukrainians fleeing their country comes from. But the unfounded claims that Ukrainians are leaving in these numbers and that the Ukrainian state imposes strict anti-Russian language policies have distinct similarities with recurring pro-Kremlin disinformation narratives.
From these, for example, we have heard that Ukrainians are fleeing their country using the visa-free regime with the EU, but also that once they flee, they are enslaved and forced to work for food.
On the other hand, pro-Kremlin media has claimed that Ukrainians themselves are enslaving Russians and forcing them to change their names according to the rules of the Ukrainian language (a language which, from the disinformers’ point of view, is often portrayed as either artificial or does not exist).
From claims of losing Crimea because of NATO enlargement to inevitable war, pro-Kremlin disinformation channels have a long tradition of portraying Ukrainian aspirations to join NATO as the source of all trouble.
Ukraine’s population declined by about 8 million people throughout 1991-2018, first of all, due to sub-replacement fertility.
The Ukrainian finance ministry provided such data on the Ukrainian population in 2018, noting that the population of the occupied territories (some 2,5 mln people living in Crimea, Sevastopol, certain areas of Luhansk and Donetsk oblasts) was not added to the total figures starting from 2015:
As of 2018, some 2,6 million of Ukrainians were migrants working abroad, mostly at seasonal works.
As for the emigration rate, the Ukrainian statistics service or UkrStat reports that every year more people immigrate to Ukraine and emigrate from it:
