The decrease in the number of recorded attempts to illegally cross the state border has not yet been accompanied by a corresponding reduction in migration outflow from Ukraine through official checkpoints.
In the first half of 2026, border guards drew up 7,523 protocols for illegal crossing or attempted illegal border crossing — about a third less than a year earlier.
At the same time, official border statistics shows that in six months, Ukrainians left the country 7.13 million times, and returned 6.89 million times.
Thus, the negative difference between departures and returns amounted to 244.3 thousand people. A year earlier, during the same period, it was comparable - about 251 thousand.
At first glance, these indicators show a significant gap between illegal attempts to leave the country and the general migration outflow. However, we are talking about fundamentally different statistical categories.
244.3 thousand is not the number of established emigrants, but the arithmetic difference between official departures and arrivals of citizens for the first half of the year. Some of these people may return to Ukraine later.
In addition, this indicator includes all citizens who have legal grounds for crossing the border, including women, children, men of the relevant categories and other persons.
7,523, in turn, is not the number of Ukrainians who managed to leave the country illegally, but the number of administrative protocols drawn up by border guards for detected illegal border crossing or an attempt to do so
However, aggregate data show that the main demographic risk for Ukraine today is related not only to illegal border crossing, but also to how many citizens who legally leave the country do not return.
According to the results of the entire year 2025, the difference between the number of citizens leaving and returning amounted to 290.3 thousand people. This was 1.5 times less than in 2024, when the negative balance reached almost 443 thousand people. During the four years of the full-scale war, according to Opendatabot's calculations, the accumulated difference between official departures and returns amounted to about 3.1 million citizens.
At the same time, in the first half of 2026 alone, the negative balance reached 244.3 thousand people, that is, it is about 84% of the indicator for the entire year 2025.
The main part of the difference this year was formed by June: during the month, the number of those who left Ukraine exceeded the number of those who returned by 210.9 thousand people. "Opendatabot" connects this, in particular, with a seasonal increase in the number of trips during the vacation period, so final conclusions about annual migration can only be made based on the results of 2026.
