Just over half of the Ukrainians living abroad still intend to come home, down from more than two-thirds a year ago, as new lives in the EU take root.

The share planning to return fell to 53% from 68%, while the share who say they do not intend to return at all doubled to 34% from 17%, according to the third wave of a Gradus Research study on return migration carried out in May. The survey covered about 600 respondents inside Ukraine and around 700 Ukrainians in EU countries.

The findings were set out by Danylo Hetmantsev, chair of the Ukrainian parliament's finance, tax and customs policy committee, in a column for NV Business on August 13. Even if the war ends on terms favourable to Kyiv, 31% say they will not go back, against 13% a year earlier.

"Over four years, people have integrated and built new lives," Hetmantsev said.

Ukraine has spent the war treating its refugee population as a resource on loan, to be recalled once the shooting stops. The survey says the loan is quietly being written off - and for a country already carrying the worst demographics in the world, the people who do not come back are the reconstruction labour force that does not exist.

Security is still the single biggest condition for returning, cited by 86% of respondents. But the ordinary business of life is catching up with it. The share naming stability and the ability to plan ahead rose to 74% from 66%, better prospects for their families to 77% from 68%, and room for personal and professional fulfilment to 56% from 49%.

The sharpest single movement is uglier. The share citing hostility at home towards those who left as a reason to stay away jumped to 53% from 30% in a year. Hetmantsev argued Ukrainians abroad need to feel the country wants them back rather than run into recrimination over who stayed and who did not.

For the first time, the factor most likely to drive Ukrainians home is not security or work but the terms on which they are allowed to stay put: 66% now name cuts to social assistance, the end of temporary protection or other administrative restrictions as potentially decisive, up from 54%. Hetmantsev's warning is that a return driven by the withdrawal of support abroad is not the same thing as a return driven by a future at home.

Inside Ukraine the picture has improved slightly, with the share considering a move abroad down to 33% from 41%. But financial pressure and family already gone are becoming bigger push factors, raising the risk of chain migration in which each departure pulls the next.

The number who simply cannot say when they might return has climbed to 66% from 49%, which is the figure that should worry Kyiv most: it is not a decision to stay away, it is the absence of any decision at all. Ukrainian refugee numbers in the EU have continued to edge higher through 2026, and analysts have already warned that millions may stay for years after the war ends, even as Kyiv prioritises their return over importing foreign labour to plug its workforce gap.

Patriotic appeals, the study found, barely move the needle. Living standards, jobs, social support and confidence in the future do.

Poland's double bind

Nowhere is that dynamic sharper than in Poland, home to the largest single group of Ukrainians in the EU. The politics has turned hostile fast. For the first time since Russia's 2022 invasion, more Poles oppose than support taking in Ukrainian refugees - 52% against 42% in a CBOS survey reported in July, against 94% backing at the start of the war.

Prime Minister Donald Tusk has warned of a rising anti-Ukrainian mood, fed by the Kremlin but grounded in real fatigue, and urged politicians to hold the line rather than ride the wave. His own government has tightened migration rules all the same. President Karol Nawrocki, in office since 2025 on the nationalist right, campaigned against Ukrainians' perceived privileges and as president vetoed a bill that would have extended welfare payments and free healthcare to them.

Set against the politics is an economy that cannot do without them. Deputy Interior Minister Maciej Duszczyk pushed back on Polsat News on August 11 at proposals to deport unemployed Ukrainian men of military age.

"If such a situation were to happen - when all Ukrainians agreed and did not go to work - the Polish economy would come to a standstill," Duszczyk said.

The numbers behind the warning are large. Some 757,700 Ukrainians were formally employed in Poland at the start of the year, nearly 68% of all foreign workers, out of a total foreign workforce of more than 1.1mn; counting the informal economy, closer to 5% of the entire workforce is Ukrainian, staffing building sites, warehouses, buses and discount stores.

And they pay their way. Ukrainians are net contributors to the Polish budget, according to state development bank BGK, handing over PLN15.1bn (EUR3.6bn) in taxes and social security in 2024 while drawing a fraction of that in child benefit, and adding an estimated 0.5% to 2.4% to annual GDP growth. A separate Deloitte study for the UN refugee agency put the level effect higher, at 2.7% of GDP in 2024, worth about EUR16bn, while Ukrainians' income-tax take alone reached PLN1.65bn (EUR385mn). Even before the war they were plugging holes Poland's own ageing, shrinking population could not fill.

Poland is caught between a politics turning against Ukrainians and an economy that cannot function without them - and a wave of earlier third-party analysis made the same point years ago. If Warsaw's harder line and the souring public mood help push its Ukrainians out, it deepens Kyiv's demographic hole and blows one in Poland's labour market at the same time.

Germany tightens the terms

Germany, which hosts more Ukrainians than any other EU state at around 1.35mn, is moving the same way. Under Chancellor Friedrich Merz's CDU/CSU-SPD coalition, Ukrainians who arrived after April 1 2025 no longer qualify for the higher Buergergeld citizen's income of EUR563 a month and instead receive the lower asylum-seeker rate of EUR441, European Pravda reported, citing an interview with Interior Minister Alexander Dobrindt.

Berlin is also backing Kyiv's drive to bring military-age men home. Merz said in April that Germany would limit Ukrainian male asylum seekers and help them return, and the two governments have set up a working group on the return of draft-age men. Dobrindt has separately endorsed a European Commission proposal to strip Ukrainian men aged 23 to 60 of automatic temporary protection, a band that covers more than 260,000 men now in Germany.

The survey's core finding is that the factors keeping Ukrainians abroad are weakening, and they are weakening fastest from the host-country side. Cheaper benefits and harder rules erode the pull just as Kyiv's need sharpens - for reconstruction labour, and, in the case of the men, for an army fighting its own manpower crisis.