More than 8.4 million Ukrainians are abroad — ombudsman Lubinets

As of 2026, more than 8.4 million Ukrainian citizens are living outside the country.

This was stated by Verkhovna Rada Human Rights Commissioner Dmytro Lubinets at the conclusion of the annual meeting of the heads of Ukraine’s foreign diplomatic missions.

“More than 8.4 million of our citizens are currently outside Ukraine. It is our duty to ensure that each of them knows: Ukraine remembers them and is ready to defend their rights,” the ombudsman wrote on his Telegram channel.

Lubinets did not draw a direct connection between the number of Ukrainians abroad and Russian aggression. At the same time, he recalled that thousands of Ukrainians remain in Russian captivity and that more than 20,000 Ukrainian children have been illegally taken from the country to Russia. In June, Lubinets noted that since 2014, when Russia began the occupation and annexation of Ukrainian territories, 8.5 million people had left the country.

The UN High Commissioner for Refugees had previously reported that 5.7 million people had left Ukraine since 2022. The European statistical agency Eurostat recorded in July 2026 that 4.38 million Ukrainian refugees were under temporary protection in the EU. The largest numbers are concentrated in Germany — 1.283 million people — followed by Poland with 967,500 and Spain with 267,400. According to the same Eurostat data, as of the end of 2021, 1.57 million Ukrainian citizens held residence permits in the EU.

The Ukrainian authorities have not published precise figures on the size of the population remaining on Ukrainian territory since the start of the full-scale invasion. State Statistics Service head Arsen Makarchuk noted in March 2026 that such calculations would only be possible 1.5 to 2 years after the end of the war. According to the State Statistics Service, more than 41 million people lived in Ukraine before the invasion — not counting the annexed Crimea and the parts of Donetsk and Luhansk regions that were occupied at that time.

On July 22, 2026, the National Academy of Sciences of Ukraine published an estimate according to which approximately 27–28 million people currently live in the territory controlled by Kyiv. The figures were provided by Oleksandr Hladun, deputy director of the Institute of Demography and Quality of Life Research.