No reason to grab the rainbow by the tail? How are forced labour migrants from Ukraine and Belarus living in the EU

Seven million Ukrainians have fled the country to escape the war. Half a million Belarusians are in exile due to repression at home. How has this affected the labour market in Europe? Do the working conditions of Ukrainians and Belarusians abroad differ from ones in the EU? How can we bring migrants back home? Find out all about this in a special project of Ukrainian.Media.

The Polish town of Mława near Warsaw is quiet and peaceful. After seven in the evening, you won't find people on the streets. In fact, there is almost no public transportation here - the bus runs once an hour. Mława lives off seasonal work, and there are several factories of a well-known brand of electronic equipment. There is also an egg factory. Hanna Yarovenko, a well-known Ukrainian filmmaker who made TV series for national channels, moved to Mława with her family at the beginning of the full-scale invasion. The cultural space in the city is poorly developed, and accordingly, Hanna failed to find a job in television. In the first months, she earned her living by selling jewellery,  because before that, making necklaces had been her hobby.

“I made dolls and sold them. That's how I survived for the first two months and at least got some ground beneath my feet. You don't know what you know, how to do it and when you might need it.”

In addition to “feeling the ground beneath her feet” in Poland, Hanna has to combat cancer and undergo some nasty regular treatment. It drains her strength and prevents her from working to the fullest. But even under such circumstances, Yarovenko found a new vocation - she started teaching in children clubs. Together with them, she makes various short films, creates animation, and directs plays.

“Both Ukrainian and Polish children are involved. But it turns out that not everyone can attend my classes. I had a Polish boy in my class, but then his mother got a job on a poultry farm and didn't have time to bring him to class, so he was there with her. I can be glad that I was able to find myself in art, because there is always a chance of working with chickens.”

Hanna's friend Victoria teaches dance to children. The rest of the time, she works as a bus driver, bringing workers to the factory. Victoria came to Poland before the war and has not yet obtained Polish citizenship. Hanna is worried that after the war ends, the Poles will thwart the possibility for the Ukrainian to stay in the country. She thinks that her chances of finding a job in Kyiv will be as just as difficult. And where will she go with her elderly parents and two children? Eight-year-old Malva has already gotten used to the local schools, both regular and music. However, right after her arrival in Poland, she felt homesick for Ukraine a lot. Yarovenko captured all these emotions in her documentary “The Voice of Mom”.

“For me, the main question about returning is not about work, but about the safety of my children. We were leaving under shellings and we don't want to go through that again,” Anna admits.

Svitlana Odynets, a researcher at the University of Gothenburg, believes that children are one of the important factors that keeps the Ukrainians abroad.

“Actually, the safety of children and the desire to educate them is our common cultural pattern. Before the war, how many women left their families to earn money for their uncles' education? Now, again, war is war, and education is in question. There are many cases when these women say that we will wait here until their child enters university, they will be providing for the first year, stay with them, and then return home. And then I will work.”

On the other hand, according to Odynets, Poland does not aim to root Ukrainian migrants, so they can be returned home quite quickly.

“In Poland, they mostly offer low-skilled repetitive tasks, when a person performs some very simple work - sorters, cashiers, nannies in kindergartens. The problem is that Poland does not require or provide compulsory learning of Polish, so where did people go? They went where they were offered jobs to support themselves. In a survival mode.”

It is important to understand that many Ukrainian refugees are at the stage of “pendulum mobility,” i.e., they live in two countries. And while working in Poland, they regularly go home to see their relatives or get their teeth treated. Unlike Ukrainians, Belarusian labour migrants cannot afford this lifestyle: most of them had left because they disagreed with the regime and face arrest in their homeland.

Using diaspora ties, 21% of the Belarusians and 3% of the Ukrainians are looking for work abroad, mostly through classifieds and employment services.

“One of the hypotheses is that Belarusians who had fled because of the regime's persecution feel more united. The other version is that many more Ukrainians have left the country and the diaspora system of mutual assistance cannot cope with such a huge wave of applicants", explains Lev Lvovsky, Academic Director of BEROC.

Valery Slepukhin had a successful business in Belarus, selling and servicing office equipment. In the wake of protests against the Lukashenko regime, Valery was forced to  Ukraine move first and later to Poland. But he could not restart his business, he says, because he did not have the capital to start.

“You can't just go to a bank and say I need a loan to start a business. If I had Polish citizenship, it would be easier.”

In Warsaw, the man got a job in a taxi service; the work was not physically hard, but the social status did not meet his expectations.

“I could not feel comfortable because I realized that I was on a lower level.”

Later, he worked at a construction site as a plumber and electrician. He also tried his hand at security at a store. All of this turned out to be not the most comfortable way to earn a living. However, Slepukhin does not complain about Poland, to where he was forced to emigrate.

“No one said we would stay as managers, there are plenty of them here. There is no need to grab the rainbow by the tail!”

From 2020 to 2024, 140,422 residence permits were issued to Belarusians in Poland. Most of them became “the workers”.

Now Valeriy continues to be involved in social activities and has plans to run a freight transportation business or a street food chain. To do this, he has started a training program that will last for two years.

Slepukhin's story is more of a trend than an exception. Belarusians who are most likely to return home are small business workers. It is not easy for them to integrate into international markets and understand its peculiarities. After all, to become a part of it, you need to subconsciously understand what the local population needs.

“There's a lack of a store here, a shoe shop there, and a dog grooming service over there. Small businesses often grow by filling in the small niches they see around them. After moving in, people need time to adapt. In addition, small businesses are associated with the local language,” explains Lev Lovsky, Academic Director of BEROC.

“It's easier with big business. When a large company moves, they hire local lawyers to help them understand the legislation. In addition, the Belarusian business innovators who have original startup ideas and do not want to end up in jail because of another raid on those who disagree with the Lukashenko regime are moving abroad.

Another purely Belarusian tendency is to run away from home to avoid working after graduating from their university studies. The fact is that Belarus still has a Soviet system in place, where a graduate of a state-funded university has to work for several years in their specialty. So, for example, smart young doctors find it easier to re-validate their diplomas outside the dictatorial state.

In the intellectual sphere, Belarusians are in demand in Germany, where doctors and IT specialists are especially valued.

“These are highly paid specialists with higher education, those who have a good command of English or German,” says Maryna Rudz, co-chair of the Razam association of Belarusians in Germany.

There are currently 30,000 Belarusians in Germany. A third of these people had moved there since 2020, when Lukashenka's repression began. But the country rarely takes these circumstances into account.

“For the most part, the official who issues these visas doesn't care what circumstances a person finds themselves under in Germany. The main thing is that they have a complete package of documents, a job and an appropriate salary.”

According to a study by the Federal Office for Migration and Refugees, in November 2024, just over a third of the newly arrived Ukrainian citizens were employed in Germany. About 211 thousand Ukrainians were registered as unemployed as of January 2025.

More than a third of Ukrainian specialists have learned the language and started working in Germany in their specialty or according to their experience, explains Yulia Sabadash, head of the European people media, a news channel for Ukrainians in Germany. At the beginning of the war, Ukrainians were employed mainly in the service sector and in labouring professions, but now the most promising industries are IT, engineering, services, insurance, elderly care, and creative professions.

In addition, since last year, the Ukrainian community in Berlin has been experiencing business activity. Many Ukrainians who used to have their own businesses at home managed to open their own business in Germany. These include gastronomy, beauty services, and shops selling Ukrainian goods.

Danylo Zbroyev, the owner of the Kaffee Büro coffee shop in Berlin, plans to develop a chain of restaurants together with the Ukrainian partners. The entrepreneur wants to create a Ukrainian business community and open a business hub in the city where his compatriots could meet and launch new joint initiatives.

“Germany already has a well-established system of refugee integration; they have already accepted Turkish and Syrian waves. The second generation of these migrants is already living there. It is difficult for adult Ukrainians who came to the country a few years ago to compete with them. But Germany is definitely more interested in keeping the children of Ukrainian migrants and using them to solve its demographic problem in the future,” explains Svitlana Odynets.

70% of the Belarusians are ready to return to their homeland as soon as the political repressions are over there. The economic factor is important for 13% of the Belarusians and 37% of the Ukrainians, according to a study by the BEROC Center.

Sociologists explain this by saying that the Belarusians left their homeland not because of the problems with low earnings, but because of an unacceptable political situation.

“Ukraine's economy is now in a much worse state than Belarus'. It's easy to explain - Russian attacks are destroying not only residential buildings, but also economic infrastructure. Many businesses and enterprises are simply standing still or working at full capacity. In Belarus, nothing like that is happening, no one is bombing factories. Yes, we have suffered a bit because of the sanctions, but the business has already reoriented itself, and found workarounds and continues to trade with Europe.

There is another indicator - in Belarus, wage growth is outpacing economic growth because there are not enough people, in particular due to mass emigration. There are not enough people, and they are forced to offer higher salaries from those that the market is demanding,” says Lev Lvovsky, the academic director of the BEROC Center.

Since 2020, salaries of the “working class” in Belarus have increased by 17% due to the outflow of relevant personnel abroad. In addition, the country has state regulation that artificially prohibits price increases. According to Lvovsky, this model will sooner or later lead to a collapse.

Ukraine also has a catastrophic shortage of labour, but the reason is different: men are at war. Businesses are experiencing and will continue to experience a shortage of labour. In this regard, there are some talks saying that when the war is over, labour migrants from developing countries will have to be attracted. How realistic is this?

“The population has decreased by 30%. And where shall we find so many builders to rebuild our cities? We now have to think not only about how to attract investors here, but who in Ukraine will manage this investment money.

Will a citizen of Uzbekistan work for a Ukrainian salary if he has the opportunity to earn much more in Germany? In fact, we all need to understand that there will be no cheap labour in Ukraine. We will be competing with Germany or Poland for these people who may come to work in Ukraine,” said Vasyl Voskoboynyk, the  president of the All-Ukrainian Association of International Employment Companies.

Daria Mykhaylyshyna, economist at the Center for Economic Strategy, believes that attracting foreign migrants to Ukraine will be the only way out of the crisis. However, it is necessary to make the legislation on foreigners in the labour sphere less bureaucratic.

“We have this shortage because of mobilization, because there is a need for, stereotypically speaking, male professions. And yet the vast majority of refugees are women. Many men went to the front and some of them, unfortunately, died. Involvement of migrants is the way we take. Even if we take the most optimistic scenario, that the war ends tomorrow, we de-occupy all the territories, all the military come back home and work, all the refugees return, our demographic situation is still bad. We cannot force women to give birth to 10 children.”

The war is a temporary challenge for the Ukrainians, but there are long-term challenges lying ahead as well.

According to a study by the Center for Economic Strategy, only 31% of Ukrainian refugees plan to return home.

“There is no simple recipe to encourage Ukrainians to return. Reconstruction, retraining courses are important not only for refugees, but also for internally displaced persons and all Ukrainians in general, because everyone needs a job,” believes Daria Mykhailyshyna.

“Ukraine has the same long-term problems as Belarus. It is a low birth rate, the fact that a large numbered generation is retiring, and a small numbered generation born in the nineties is now having children and entering the labour market,” Lev Lvovsky.

According to a researcher Svitlana Odynets, two categories of Ukrainians are now returning home.

“The first group is people who cannot cope anywhere. They are so inadaptive to life that it is difficult for them to navigate in an environment without a language. These are often people from the Eastern and Southern regions. They return to their ruined homes, because at least there they know and have a social network that somehow keeps them afloat. And the second category is highly qualified specialists - doctors, psychologists, lawyers. These are professions where it takes a long time to retrain.”

Kateryna Voloshko represents another, patriotic cluster of returnees. A teacher by training, she worked for more than a decade for a Polish company in the foreign client service department. The company provided official work permits allowing her staying abroad

“Some of my colleagues were women with little children, some were students. The firm needs people who know a foreign language, but many Poles are not interested in working under such conditions - they will either look for work abroad or demand higher salaries.”

But with the start of the full-scale invasion, Kateryna decided to return to Ukraine immediately. She wanted to join the military.

“More than one person told me to go to see a psychologist, you have a depressive disorder and a desire to commit suicide,” Kateryna laughs.

A year ago, she returned to her homeland and works as a paramedic. She provides first aid to wounded soldiers and has no regrets about staying here.

“I am at home here, but not there. I still feel it, I still know that I am an outsider there.”

Since 2022, about a million Ukrainian refugees have been living in Poland. This is 18% of all those who have gone abroad.

“Ukrainians are more focused on fitting in with the local community than creating our own Ukrainian enclave, we are our own group. We are more open to learning a language and establishing connections with locals.”

According to the State Statistics Service, Ukraine has lost almost 50% of its labour capital over the past 10 years. Only 30% of refugees hope to return home when the war ends.

“It is better to encourage them to return. Not to force them out by creating bureaucratic obstacles. Because you can force a person to return, but he or she will return with a different attitude, a mindset towards their country as an enemy.”

Olena Solodovnikova, Yulia Valova

The project was created with the support of the Collaborative and Investigative Journalism Initiative - CIJI2 project, which is managed by Free Press Unlimited.

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