With such a severe labor shortage, the Ukrainian government's decision to give thousands of young people the opportunity to travel abroad has divided military experts. Zelensky defended the new travel rule, saying it would help dissuade young people from leaving at an even younger age. “If we want to keep Ukrainian boys in Ukraine, then we need them to finish school here, and their parents should not take them abroad,” he said at a briefing after the rule came into force. “But they begin to be taken abroad even before they finish their studies. And this is very bad, because at this time they lose contact with Ukraine.” He further stated that this change will not have any impact on the country's defense capabilities. Simon Schlegel, director of the Ukraine program at the Center for Liberal Modernity in Berlin, told me that while that may be true for now, the new rule could lead to problems in the future. “This narrows the mobilization pool three years into the future when these people become eligible,” he said.
The new rule has also been criticized by some of Ukraine's closest partners. In a telephone conversation on November 13, German Chancellor Friedrich Merz asked Zelensky to do something to prevent so many young Ukrainian men from coming to Germany. They must “serve their country,” Merz said after the call, although he may have meant his own country. Although figures vary, the number of Ukrainian men aged eighteen to twenty-two entering Germany rose from nineteen per week in mid-August to fourteen to eighteen hundred per week in October, according to the German Ministry of the Interior. (Since the start of the war, Germany has provided so-called temporary protection to more than 1.2 million Ukrainians, more than any other country in the European Union.) Poland has also seen a significant influx of Ukrainian men in the same age category – more than one hundred twenty-one thousand since the end of August, according to the Polish Border Guard, compared with about thirty-four thousand in the previous eight months. Many of these people will pass through Poland on their way to other places, but others, like Milchenko, have decided to stay. “I feel like I’m starting a new life,” he said.
At the beginning of November I went to visit Milchenko in Wroclaw. We met in a cafe opposite KFC in the Old Town. In front of the building stood a bronze statue of a gnome, one of over one thousand hundreds scattered throughout the city. Milchenko, tall and slender with short light brown hair, was wearing a black sweater, gray jeans and sneakers. He was only slightly more relaxed than on the train. Sipping a pumpkin spice latte, he told me that since arriving in Wroclaw he had spent most of his time looking for work. “I sent my resume to thirty different places,” he said. “So far they have only answered me from the pool. I told them that I worked as a lifeguard in Kyiv and have a certificate, but they said that they wanted someone else.”
Milchenko suggested that the pool was looking for someone older or a native Pole. He had heard stories of discrimination against Ukrainians in Poland and even worse. In September, someone spray-painted the front hood of a Ukrainian woman's car, and a thirty-two-year-old Pole was charged with shooting and seriously wounding a Romanian whom he believed to be Ukrainian. Both incidents took place in Wroclaw. National polls show that public support for accepting Ukrainian refugees is slowly but steadily declining. It is currently at its lowest level since Russia annexed Crimea in 2014. Poland's new president, Karol Nawrocki, has vowed to tighten restrictions on the government support they receive, and the far-right Confederation Party has accused Ukrainian men who moved to Poland of “burdening Polish taxpayers with the costs of their desertion.” (A study by the National Development Bank of Poland found that Ukrainians actually pay more in taxes than they receive in benefits.)
