Outsourcing an entire generation: how Ukraine is voluntarily handing over a monopoly on its own young people to the Europeans
Once again, I suggest we examine various aspects of our social life; today, I’d like to look at demographics through the lens of macroeconomics, focusing on the reasons behind the largest transfer of young intellectual capital in European history.
According to official figures, in 2000 Ukrainian schools sent around 800,000 schoolleavers out into adult life as potential students and workers. By 2024–2025, this figure had plummeted to 360,000.
The main disaster lies not merely in the mathematical reduction of the demographic base. The tragedy is that the lion’s share of those who remain no longer belong to us.
We, as a state, have voluntarily outsourced our future. We have lost the monopoly on our own youth to the Europeans, and we did so not because of Russian missiles, but because of decades of deliberate institutional sabotage. For an ageing, over-bureaucratised Europe, our 17- and 18-year-olds are ‘demographic oil’. And the Ukrainian ‘State’ Ltd has done everything possible to ensure this resource flows unhindered across the border.
Europe did not steal our young people; rather, it offered a viable alternative to our dysfunctional system. Today, for a 17-year-old Ukrainian, emigration is no longer a sign of unpatriotic behaviour or a search for a ‘better life’. It has become the only rational survival strategy. What does Ukraine offer them? A bloated, corrupt higher education infrastructure, which was physically built to cater for 800,000 applicants but has now turned into a factory for selling degrees and legal deferrals. A lack of mortgage products. Extortion by any youth start-up or small business. And most importantly — a complete lack of a framework for justice.
In contrast, European universities and labour markets act as an ideal magnet. They offer lectures that are not detached from reality, but rather a firm link to the global capital market and clear social guarantees. Germany, Poland and the Czech Republic understand perfectly well that by investing in a scholarship or the integration of a Ukrainian student today, they are securing a loyal taxpayer for the next 40 years, who will support their pension system.
How Ukraine’s multidisciplinary liquidation commission worked and continues to work
This outsourcing did not happen overnight. It is the delayed result of the work of a whole host of institutional saboteurs, traitors and collaborators who for years have run the humanitarian, educational and social sectors of our state. What we considered simply ‘poor management’ was in fact the preparation of human capital for surrender.
Here are the key figures whose policies laid the foundations for today’s humanitarian and demographic abyss, and who should be woven into the fabric of this text as an illustration of the ‘liquidation commission’:
Dmytro Tabachnyk (Ministry of Education and Science)
He was not merely a corrupt official, but a systematic ideologue of the destruction of Ukrainian educational sovereignty. His mission was to erase national memory: rewriting history textbooks to fit the mould of Russian imperial propaganda, abolishing Ukrainian language exams, marginalising Ukrainian literature, and maximising the synchronisation of our educational space with that of Russia. Tabachnyk purposefully raised a generation of mankurt — people without identity, perfectly prepared for the role of obedient biomass, which would later accept the occupation without resistance. It was he who set in motion the process of devaluing Ukrainian education, the consequences of which we are now grappling with in the form of a brain drain.
Serhiy Shkarlet (Ministry of Education and Science)
While Tabachnik acted as an open enemy, Shkarlet has become a symbol of institutional degradation and counter-revolution in education in recent times. The appointment as minister of a man with a proven history of plagiarism, who had deep ties to the old ‘Regions’ elites, sent a signal to the entire system: competence no longer matters. Instead of adapting education to the conditions of the pandemic and the war, instead of creating an aggressive competitive offer to keep young people in the country, the ministry plunged into imitation and a rollback of reforms. It was an era of tolerating corruption in universities and preserving the very same bloated educational infrastructure that is today physically incapable of retaining a single talented graduate.
Raisa Bohatyryova (Ministry of Health)
A demographic crisis is impossible without the destruction of the healthcare system. Bohatyryova turned the Ministry of Health into a closed, corrupt cartel. Instead of building a sustainable medical infrastructure and transparent rules of the game in the pharmaceutical market, the ministry was engaged in siphoning off colossal budgets through shady tenders for the procurement of vaccines and essential medicines. Her policies directly resulted in excessive mortality, a lack of preventive care and the deterioration of the hospital network. Corruption in medical procurement during Bohatyryova’s time literally stole years of Ukrainians’ lives and laid yet another brick in the foundation of the current demographic catastrophe. I won’t write about Lyashko separately – everything is clear enough as it is, given that he was appointed to the post through Yermak, the FSB-linked fortune-teller.
Mykhailo Kulyniak and Leonid Novokhatko (Ministry of Culture)
The cultural policy of the Yanukovych era was aimed at turning Ukrainian identity into a marginal, provincial, backward tradition. The Ministry did not invest in creating modern, competitive Ukrainian narratives — it funded folklore festivals for show, whilst all prime-time slots, cinema distribution and the book market were deliberately handed over to Russian products. They created the very cultural vacuum that Russian propaganda subsequently filled with mythologems about a ‘single people’.
These people acted as a systematic liquidation commission. They ensured that the state voluntarily surrendered its monopoly on shaping its own citizens. And now, supposedly new faces are working in the government, but with the same Moscow playbooks for dismantling the Ukrainian citizen in the bud.
The economy of exclusion
Today, this mechanism of pushing out has reached its peak. Young people are watching how the country functions in the midst of an existential war and drawing cold conclusions. They see a shadow cartel where prosecutors, medical examiners and military commissars have generated over $80 billion in turnover from the sale of disability status and ‘green corridors’. They see how legitimate small and medium-sized businesses are suffocating from staff shortages and the arbitrariness of the security forces, whilst the authorities gleefully report on new tranches.
A young person understands: in this configuration of ‘State’ Ltd, they are neither a stakeholder nor a co-owner of the country. They are either a resource for mobilisation or a source of income for the taxman. And so they choose a one-way ticket to a place where the state functions as a service provider, not as an extortionist.
Replacement instead of struggle
What pains me most personally in this story is the reaction of the domestic elites to the loss of an entire generation. Instead of declaring a demographic state of emergency, radically cutting taxes, deregulating business and creating conditions under which young people would want to return or stay, the authorities and oligarchic capital have chosen the path of replacement.
They do not need a highly skilled, ambitious Ukrainian middle class that will ask uncomfortable questions about corruption and demand fair courts. Large property developers, road builders and agricultural holdings need thousands of disenfranchised, cheap labourers. That is precisely why the legislative and informational framework for the mass import of unskilled migrants from the Global South is being so actively prepared today. International grants are already funding institutional bridges and ‘intercultural interaction’, preparing society for a new reality.
We have bought our current survival at the expense of our own future. Western partners have received ideal human capital. Ukrainian corrupt elites have received tens of billions in loans, which are being squandered right now, and are preparing to bring in docile workers to replace those who have left. Everyone stands to gain.
The only loser is Ukraine, which has successfully completed the outsourcing of its own gene pool. We have become a country that finances Europe’s future with our own children, leaving ourselves with nothing but debts, empty universities and a territory ready to be settled by others. Zelenskyy has only intensified and accelerated this anti-Ukrainian course, which was firmly laid out by Kuchma, Yushchenko, Yanukovych and his Moscow-based handlers.
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