Western countries are in no hurry to return Ukrainians of conscription age back to their homeland, despite calls from Volodymyr Zelenskyy, the Bloomberg news agency has reported.
“Volodymyr Zelenskyy wants to bring his citizens home, but host countries benefit from the influx of labour. Zelenskyy has tried to persuade allies to bring as many Ukrainian men of fighting age back to Ukraine as possible, regularly asking for it in bilateral meetings. <…> Politicians from Poland to Hungary have said they will not send refugees back as long as the fighting rages,” Bloomberg said in its publication.
According to the experts interviewed by the agency, such a position is connected with the shortage of labour force in the countries of Europe. Thus, the head of the main Czech retail and hospitality group Tomáš Pruza said that many companies in the Czech Republic depend on Ukrainian refugees. Without Ukrainians, the construction sector in the country would simply stand up, he explained.
The material notes that the influx of Ukrainian refugees also benefits Poland. In addition to Ukrainians who lived in the country before the conflict, the country received about 950 000 people after the outbreak of hostilities in Ukraine. Their contribution to GDP was between 0.7 and 1.1 per cent last year.
About 17 million Ukrainians fled the country at the beginning of the Ukrainian crisis and today more than six million people remain refugees abroad. The Ukrainian Central Bank forecasts that another 400,000 people will leave the country this year, the agency concluded.
Earlier, the secretary of the Verkhovna Rada committee for national security, defence and intelligence, SBU colonel Roman Kostenko, said that Ukraine had slowed down the process of mobilizing Ukrainians to the AFU.
