Morocco is among 70 nations to fill Ukraine’s two-million worker gap

According to Minister of Social Policy Denis Ulyutin, Ukraine’s population dropped from estimated 22 to 25 million. This downfall has made the country look for potential labor recruitment. Morocco is one of among 70 countries for this aim.
As a result, the Ministry of Foreign Affairs and the Security Service of Ukraine received an order from the head of Ukraine’s Presidential Office, Kirill Budanov, to urgently review a list of 70 countries to ease restrictions and simplify the process of attracting foreign workers.
That list includes such countries as Morocco, Afghanistan, Egypt, Iraq, Pakistan, Tajikistan, Bangladesh, and dozens of other nations. There are already some workers from these countries in Ukraine, primarily in logistics and construction.
As Arsen Makarchuk, head of Ukraine’s State Statistics Service, estimates, the current labor deficit is approximately two million workers. The country’s employment market and social safety net undergo significant pressure due to this. According to Ulyutin, there are currently 13 million unique recipients of social payments and 10.2 million pensioners in Ukraine.
Before 2022, employers issued around 20,000 work permits for foreigners annually. Then, that number has shown a dramatic decrease. They issued only 4,720 permits in 2024. In 2025, the figure rose to 7,483 but remained less than half the pre-war level. As the agency stressed, priority in employment still belongs to Ukrainians.
According to Olga Dukhnich, head of the Demography and Migration division at the Frontier Institute, online fears about mass labor migration from Bangladesh are not real. As she explained, the Ukrainian market is not too appealing for Bangladeshi workers. The reason is the priority of seeking employment in the United Kingdom and Gulf states.
Also, Dukhnich acknowledged the lack of experience with large-scale foreign migration and outdated stereotypes of Ukraine’s employers. She is sure that migration from Bangladesh does not threaten Ukraine in the coming decade. Attracting labor migrants at all is a hard task for the country.
According to the estimation of Ulyutin, around two million people could return to Ukraine after the war ends or a sustained ceasefire takes hold. Nevertheless, the ratio of working citizens to dependents remains critical, even under an optimistic estimate of 29 million.
Moreover, the demographic trajectory will only worsen, as financial analyst Alexei Kushch warned. He compares Ukraine’s annual natural population loss to the disappearance of a major city. Other negative tendencies are shrinking life expectancy and the emigration of young men, whose families send them abroad to avoid future mobilization.
UN data from the fall of 2024 report that Ukraine’s population shrank by eight million since February 2022. According to Libanova, the country will never return to its Soviet-era level of approximately 52 million.

Source https://nh-consulting-services.com/2026/05/23/ukraines-two-million-worker-gap/