Emigrants Leaving Ukraine Behind

— natalie rudnichenko

To speak honestly, obtaining a visa free agreement with Europe was inspiring news for many Ukrainians. Future journeys, business trips, and holidays in Europe long sounded like a prophecy from the mouth of politicians. It was a real freedom from collecting piles of documents, work letters, bank accounts recipes to prove, after long hours in a queue, you can obtain a Schengen visa.

I attended a wcsf conference in the autumn of 2012 and each trip was the problem for me because of the need to obtain a visa. Deeply inside I felt confused, communicating and making friends with an international and friendly group. Why couldn’t I, a journalist of the international airlines corporate magazine, with a PhD prolong my trip to Europe or visit my new friends freely?

But of course, problems of Ukraine’s relations with the eu lie far behind free travel. They are mainly about so-called

“European values” (freedoms, rule of law, economic stability) as absolute values and link to higher living standards and overwhelming desire to try their luck in Europe by Ukrainian migrant workers. Especially nowadays, when Euro 1 equals uah 30.This is almost three times more than before autumn of 2013 when political events of Maidan started. In results, hundreds of thousands of middle class Ukrainians became three times poorer despite obtaining new freedoms after President Yanukovich’s regime failed. And in our consumeristic society this matters.

On August 24 we celebrated the 26th anniversary of the Independence Day of Ukraine and we were informed that from June 11, the right to visa-free travel had already been used by 200,000 Ukrainians. It is noted that 90,000 Ukrainians crossed the border with Poland and Hungary. Since the start of the visa-free agreement, only a bit more than 60 Ukrainians were denied entry. The main reasons for the refusal to enter were the exceeding of the terms of stay in the eu during the previous trips and the absence of documents confirming the purpose and conditions of stay in the countries of the European Union.

So we see that visiting is not massive and the main concern of the current Ukrainian authority is not to lose the best workforce and brains – people who would go to Europe for a better life.

“Citizens of Ukraine leave the country, because in Ukraine there is no rule of law.” This was said by the mayor of the most successful western Ukrainian city Lviv, Andriy Sadovy, on the air on NewsOne. Among the main obstacles to normal life in Ukraine, the mayor named a high level of corruption, especially in the activity of courts and prosecutors’ offices. This is not to mention a still ongoing actual war in the East of Ukraine which made many Ukrainians internally displaced people.

“Recently I spoke with the Mayor of Wroclaw, and he said that there were 100,000 Ukrainians - and that’s more than 12% of the inhabitants of Wroclaw.” Generally in Poland there are about 7 million of them. Do you know what saves Lviv? We, in principle, have a high level of comfort. Thousands of people work in the it sphere where the average salary is about $ 2,000”.

But only the it people and top managers are so lucky in Ukraine. The rest live on a meager salary of an average of 100-200 Euro – too little by European standards. And the current young and middle-aged generation doesn’t want to wait for the future glory of Ukraine like that which their parents lived in.

Czech Republic. The creative class are heading to London, it people to Germany, and many middle class Ukrainians simply became downshifters somewhere in Bali, India, Thailand – near the ocean, beach and sun. And this make story of migration a bit more optimistic, at least for some of my compatriots.

But in a sad story of empty political talks about European integration by Ukraine’s politicians and a high level of corruption and a very lavish life of the top officials (which they don’t bother themselves to hide) mass work migration is one important point. Nowadays migration is a global trend. Not all Ukrainians go as low paid workers to Poland or the

— natalie rudnichenko

Natalie Rudnichenko, PhD in General Linguistics, journalist. Lives and works in Kyiv, Ukraine. Several times participant in wscf events