In the first quarter of 2026, employers in the capital issued only about 790 permits for the employment of foreign citizens – this is the statistic given on Facebook by former Minister of Social Policy Pavlo Rozenko. The capital, where more than 416 thousand internally displaced persons have already been registered, is acutely experiencing a shortage of personnel, but foreign migrants still make up an insignificant share in this picture. Rozenko called on not to panic due to manipulations around the topic of labor migration. In his opinion, the spread of alarming materials about the “mass importation” of foreigners is a deliberate information injection.<\/p>\n
The former official posted the corresponding publication on his Facebook page. Rozenko clarified: this is exclusively about Kyiv and only about one quarter. He emphasized the contrast between panic publications on social networks and the real state of affairs recorded in official statistics.<\/p>\n
790, Karl!! This is about nothing at all. Not even “a little”.<\/p>\n
In total, in Ukraine in 2025, employers issued about 9,582 permits for the employment of foreigners, and as of April 22, 2026, there were already 3,213 new permits. For comparison: before the full-scale invasion, in 2021, about 22 thousand such documents were issued annually throughout the country. That is, after the start of the war, the number of legal foreign labor migrants in Ukraine has significantly decreased – contrary to what is actively written on social networks. The permit for the employment of labor is not received by the migrant himself, but by his employer – through the regional employment center.<\/p>\n
Rozenko’s followers reacted ambiguously. Some agree: one of the commentators noted that the current number of foreigners is much smaller than the Armenians, Azerbaijanis or Georgians who have long been present in Ukraine – “and nothing terrible.” Others, however, are more alarmed: some point out that the official data do not include those who work illegally or enter the country on student visas through private universities. Some commentators suspect that the activation of the topic in the media space precedes attempts to lobby for the simplification of migration legislation.<\/p>\n
It is worth noting that the legal framework for attracting labor migrants in Ukraine remains strict and financially costly. The cost of legalizing one foreign worker for an employer is from 30 to 40 thousand hryvnias, and the registration procedures themselves take much longer than, for example, in Poland. At the end of April, the OP instructed the Ministry of Foreign Affairs and the Security Service of Ukraine to review the list of about 70 countries for simplified attraction of labor migrants. In the same April, the Center for Countering Disinformation recorded a deepfake in which an official of the Chernivtsi OVA allegedly called for “replacing” Ukrainians who died on the front with migrants from Central Asia and Africa – an obvious element of the Russian information attack.<\/p>\n
The greatest demand for foreign labor in Ukraine is concentrated in construction, processing industry and trade. Among the countries whose citizens most often receive permits are Turkey, India and Bangladesh: in 2025, Bangladeshi citizens, for example, received 599 work permits in Ukraine. Migrants mostly apply for vacancies that Ukrainians are not ready to fill due to difficult conditions or low pay. Migration policy experts emphasize that even with a permit, a smaller proportion of those who were issued it actually come, since some do not pass consular checks or refuse to move.<\/p>\n
Kyiv and the shortage of personnel: what the authorities are doing
\nThe capital’s labor market is under significant pressure: according to the State Employment Service, the number of vacancies in Kyiv exceeds the number of registered unemployed by 24 times. Responding to this request, the Kyiv City Council is considering the possibility of providing free housing to specialists from the regions who are involved in the city’s reconstruction. That is, the city is looking for personnel primarily among Ukrainian citizens from other regions, and not among foreigners. A few hundred permits per year for foreigners is a statistically insignificant share of what the capital really needs for recovery.<\/p>\n
Mobilization plays a separate role in the reduction of labor resources. Since the beginning of 2026, the CCC in the capital has opened 3,835 administrative proceedings, and the demand for conscripts remains consistently high. For business, this means a constant narrowing of the available labor force – especially in the fields of manual labor and construction. The shortage of personnel is really deepening, however, according to official data, filling these vacancies with foreign migrants is still taking place on a meager scale – and the figure of 790 permits per quarter confirms this.<\/p>","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
In the first quarter of 2026, employers in the capital issued only about 790 permits for the employment of foreign citizens – this is the statistic given on Facebook by former Minister of Social Policy Pavlo Rozenko. The capital, where more than 416 thousand internally displaced persons have already been registered, is acutely experiencing a […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":10995,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[12,19],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-10994","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-actually","category-expert"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/corporativ.info\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/10994","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/corporativ.info\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/corporativ.info\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/corporativ.info\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/corporativ.info\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=10994"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/corporativ.info\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/10994\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":10996,"href":"https:\/\/corporativ.info\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/10994\/revisions\/10996"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/corporativ.info\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/10995"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/corporativ.info\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=10994"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/corporativ.info\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=10994"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/corporativ.info\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=10994"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}