The number of Ukrainian citizens in Germany will increase sevenfold in 2022

Hundreds of thousands of Ukrainians have come to Germany since the Russian war of aggression began. In 2022, around 1.1 million immigrants from the state were recorded, as the Federal Statistical Office in Wiesbaden announced on Thursday based on the preliminary results of a special evaluation.

Because in the course of the year not only people from the war zone came to Germany, but also moved away again, the statistics show that there was a net immigration of 962,000 people from Ukraine in the past year. "This means that net immigration from Ukraine to Germany last year was greater than that from Syria, Afghanistan and Iraq combined in 2014 and 2016," it said.

According to the data, most of the people from Ukraine arrived in the first three months after the invasion began on February 24. From May the number of returnees increased. In 2022, a total of 139,000 people moved from Germany to Ukraine.

As a result of immigration, the population with Ukrainian citizenship in this country has “more than sevenfold”, as the office has calculated. The proportion of Ukrainians in the total population was recently 1.2 percent. "Ukrainian nationals were the second largest foreign population group in Germany after Turkish nationals."

Because men were only allowed to leave Ukraine under certain conditions, 63 percent of those who fled were women. And they were comparatively young: only 13 percent were older than 60 last October; around a third was younger than 18 years. In the age groups of 18 and over, more than twice as many women as men came to Germany from the Ukraine.

In October 2022, most Ukrainians lived in North Rhine-Westphalia (210,000), Bavaria (152,000), Baden-Württemberg (135,000) and Lower Saxony (105,000). As a proportion of the total population of the respective federal state, most lived in Berlin and Hamburg (1.5 percent each).