The question facing Ukrainians in Canada and abroad: Should they stay or should they go?

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Michael Bociurkiw is a senior fellow at the Atlantic Council and founder of the World Briefing report on Substack.

When I sold my condo in Sidney, B.C., a few years ago and began the ritual of downsizing, it hit me somewhere between the linen and the fragile china teacups handed down to me by my mama, Vera, that much of what I owned had come from my parents, immigrants who arrived from Ukraine with next to nothing. Now I was giving it away – free, of course – to newly arrived Ukrainians starting over in Canada. A circle, quietly completing itself.

Never in our lifetimes did we imagine it would close this way. My generation of Ukrainian Canadians spent our youth demonstrating in front of the then-Soviet Embassy on Charlotte Street in Ottawa, drafting petitions and protest letters, crafting memorable slogans – “KGB, set them free!” – and fighting for an independence we weren’t sure we’d live to see.

But independence did come, in 1991 – and it was meant to be the beginning of a story we’d been raised on. In Ukrainoznavstvo – the Tuesday evening Ukrainian studies classes generations of us reluctantly sat through – we absorbed a fairy-tale version of a free and independent Ukraine, happily ever after. But nobody’s curriculum included this: that decades later we’d be furnishing apartments for compatriots driven out by Russian missiles – or that Canada, having welcomed nearly 300,000 of them, would quietly decline to say whether they can stay.

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It’s worth remembering the standing this community once enjoyed: Ukrainians were among the largest of Canada’s “other” communities – neither British nor French – with enough sway that voices like Senator Paul Yuzyk, who used his 1964 maiden speech to declare Canada a multicultural nation, helped convince Pierre Trudeau’s government to adopt multiculturalism as official policy in 1971, cracking open the two-solitudes framework that our parents said always made them feel like outsiders in their own country.

Fast forward to now: The hundreds of thousands who arrived since February, 2022, are, for many reasons, facing the question of whether to stay or go home. The second option – to head for the exits – has become even more complicated, as I write this from a city that explains why.

Here in Odesa, the talk is not of return but of departure. Russian ballistic missiles and drones keep coming, making the southern Ukrainian port city sound like Beirut during the worst periods of its wars. On Wednesday, the war literally arrived on my doorstep: A historic cultural centre and adjacent apartment building down the block were struck by a drone. The same scenario is playing out across Ukraine, nowhere more than the Kyiv region. Ahead of a planned visit to Kyiv this week – aborted, in the end, because of missile strikes – I texted a Ukrainian friend to pull together a small gathering of one of my social circles there. The reply came back almost instantly: “They’ve all scattered overseas.”

Explainer: What’s behind the protests in Ukraine?

I’ll admit something: This week, for the first time since basing myself in Odesa, the thought crossed my mind – walking through Shevchenko Park as air-raid alerts sounded and explosions shook us – that the time to leave is approaching. What has changed is the sound of the war: We hardly hear drones any more. It’s ballistic missiles now, flying largely unimpeded overhead. From Odesa’s shores, I have watched foreign-flagged vessels burn – so many strikes on merchant shipping in recent weeks that we are losing count of the ships hit and the mariners killed and injured; another major fire lit the horizon Monday afternoon. The asymmetry is no longer deniable: Ukraine strikes Russia, Russia strikes back, and the side striking back has far deeper reserves, Western support notwithstanding. If that thought is entering my head, imagine the calculus of a mother in a Kyiv apartment block – or of her sister in Calgary, deciding whether to book a flight home.

The old guard wins

Meanwhile in Kyiv, to make matters worse, a political rupture has confirmed what many Ukrainians abroad quietly fear: that the old Ukraine is winning. The dismissal of defence minister Mykhailo Fedorov – young, tech-savvy, charismatic and widely credited with recent battlefield gains – after just six months triggered nationwide protests and the resignation of one of the country’s most respected drone commanders, Pavlo Yelizarov, who called the move “a great evil” for Ukraine’s defence.

The contrast with last summer is telling – and it’s not only to do with the vast swaths of empty beach chairs on the seafront below from where I write this. When President Volodymyr Zelensky moved to gut Ukraine’s anti-corruption bodies in 2025, G7 ambassadors spoke out with the weight of their capitals behind them – and he backtracked within days.

This time: a deafening silence from Western embassies. As one Kyiv analyst, Olena Tregub, put it, that silence is precisely why the President felt free to dig in his heels. In the end it was the street, not the West, that moved him: After six days of nationwide protests, Mr. Zelensky relented and replaced commander-in-chief Oleksandr Syrskyi with Mykhailo Drapatyi, a 43-year-old seen as close to the reform camp. But Mr. Fedorov remains outside of the cabinet, and many here say the damage has already been done.

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I have long argued that Ukraine is fighting two wars: one against Russia, and one against its own corruption. Diaspora leaders have pushed back on me forcefully for saying so. But the two must be won together, because of one hard truth: Ukrainians will not come back to the old Ukraine. And this week, the old Ukraine flexed – a military bureaucracy that refuses to be dragged from ships to chips.

The concentration of power extends well beyond the cabinet. Flexing his wartime authority, Mr. Zelensky has moved against elected mayors and replaced them with loyalists unfamiliar to the communities they now run. Last year in Odesa, the long-serving mayor, Gennadiy Trukhanov, was stripped of his citizenship over an alleged Russian passport – a charge he denies – and the city placed under a military administration headed by an outsider parachuted in from another region. Locals I speak with connect moves like these directly to the President’s sinking popularity.

Welcome, for now

Which brings the question home – literally – to Canada. It is safe to assume that the recent slide in accountability in Kyiv, the perception that anti-corruption efforts are half-hearted at best, and the departure of Mr. Fedorov and his circle – credited with making Ukrainian skies safer and with pushing conscription reform to the top of the agenda – will give war-displaced Ukrainians in Canada one more reason to stay, or at least to delay their return to the homeland. Among Ukrainians I speak with – in Kyiv, Odesa and beyond – a darker fear keeps surfacing: that the Ukraine they know is being dismantled from without and within at once.

Also a consideration for Ottawa, given the rapidly deteriorating situation in Ukraine: Should it reopen the generous Canada-Ukraine Authorization for Emergency Travel (CUAET) program to new arrivals? Emerging evidence suggests many more Ukrainians are weighing whether to leave as cities such as Kyiv and Odesa come under unprecedented attack amid a shortage of Patriot interceptors.

Canada gives Ukrainians who fled war another year to apply for work permit extensions

For those already in Canada, there’s a growing expectation that a pathway to permanent residency should be on offer – and not without reason. After so many years, they’ve put down roots and filled jobs in sectors Canada is desperate to staff: Chronically short-handed BC Ferries currently employs more than 100 people from Ukraine. Yet the original CUAET announcement was explicit: Applicants were expected to return to Ukraine “when it is safe to do so,” and the program was never meant as a refugee stream.

Ottawa can’t claim it hasn’t been asked. Recently, a parliamentary petition initiated by a group of Ukrainian newcomers in Calgary and sponsored by Liberal MP Yvan Baker, calling for a dedicated permanent residency pathway for CUAET holders, drew more than 17,000 signatures in the first day alone, and almost 48,000 signatures before being presented in the House of Commons. The Ukrainian Canadian Congress has tabled its own proposal, modelled on Canada’s existing pathway for Hongkongers, and Senator Stan Kutcher says his conversations with Immigration Minister Lena Diab have met a “positive reception.”

Yet months on, nothing has changed: no program, no announcement, no answer for the estimated 60,000 or more who would apply tomorrow if they could. Understanding, it seems, is where Ottawa’s generosity ends. Liberal MP Peter Fragiskatos, responding to the petition on behalf of the government, said most CUAET applicants are expected to “return home to contribute to Ukraine’s recovery and reconstruction,” and that those who wish to stay can apply through existing family reunification pathways.

Granting permanent residency, though, is a move that may not go over well in Kyiv: Mr. Zelensky has made clear, including at a news conference I attended, that he wants as many of the displaced as possible to return to Ukraine to help with reconstruction.

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In theory, that sounds smart – many will have acquired new professional and language skills that Ukraine badly needs. But there’s a serious snag that could make millions of Ukrainian men reluctant to return: Kyiv has yet to announce a general amnesty for those who left the country to avoid military service under martial law. The scale of the manpower crisis is staggering: Since 2022, prosecutors have opened more than 250,000 criminal cases for soldiers going AWOL or deserting, with the pace accelerating sharply in 2025 – and Mr. Fedorov himself, in his appointment speech in January, acknowledged that 200,000 soldiers were absent without leave and that two million are “wanted” for evading the draft.

Meanwhile, more than 800,000 Ukrainian men of conscription age have managed to exit and remain in the European Union – and few are expected to return while the war lasts. Government insiders have privately floated the obvious fix: a general amnesty from Mr. Zelensky for men who left the country. Instead, the machinery is moving the other way: Kyiv and Berlin have quietly formed a working group on returning draft-age men, and Brussels has proposed stripping newly arriving military-age men of automatic protection.

Grievance, well-earned and weaponized

On the face of it, many Ukrainians who fled Russia’s full-scale invasion in 2022 wouldn’t need much encouragement to leave should conditions improve back home. That’s the overwhelming sense projected in social-media posts and private conversations with Ukrainians in Canada in recent months, many gathered under TikTok’s #Canada_life hashtag. The top complaint is frustration with living in an immigration limbo without a clear path to permanent residency or citizenship. That’s quickly followed by the cost of living – one TikTok creator, Alina Loboda, tallied the monthly bill for her family of four in Alberta at about $7,500 – then crime, homelessness, a broken health care system, resentment of other immigrant groups, cold winters, even what some see as Canadians’ overly casual office dress habits – and most recently, smoke from wildfires in eastern Canada.

Some of this frustration is well earned. Several have told me they feel demoralized at having to take full-time jobs far below their professional qualifications, especially in medical fields. What one described as a “health care cartel” prevents new Canadians from entering a system crying out for new blood. What’s more, those wanting to upgrade their credentials often can’t afford the international student fees most provinces charge non-permanent residents (though there are exceptions, especially in the prairie provinces).

Having reviewed hours of TikTok videos posted by Ukrainians from many regions of Canada – many of them, tellingly, in Russian – I am left with the sense that many use the platform simply to let off steam. Some of the loudest voices, it turns out, are serial relocators – Dubai, then the United States, now Canada – and still not happy. The problem, as I see it and as I recently shared with diaspora audiences in Edmonton and Calgary, is that some posts are ready-made ammunition: easily hijacked by pro-Russian bloggers or anti-immigrant groups and turned against the Ukrainian community itself. And it’s precisely the least sympathetic voices that hostile amplifiers will present as the face of the entire community.

Putin’s quiet victory

So here we are, in limbo – in Kyiv, in Ottawa, in rented basements from St. John’s to Cranbrook, B.C. No single policy decision will make this right, either for the millions who fled or for a Ukraine desperately short of people. But an unco-ordinated, poorly considered response – which is what both capitals are currently offering – could hand Russian President Vladimir Putin the victory he could not win on the battlefield: the demographic hollowing out of Ukraine.

No one holds more of the deciding cards than Mr. Zelensky. The week opened with protests in the streets below his office over the firing of his defence minister; his response to that crisis, and his conduct of a war he knows grows harder to win with each month, will do more than any Canadian visa program to determine whether Ukrainians come home. He knows the arithmetic: The longer the war grinds on, the fewer will return.

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There are levers Mr. Zelensky could pull. As I have been advocating since early last year, loosening aspects of martial law would signal to an exhausted population – at home and abroad – that better days are ahead. A logical start: Reopening airports and easing curfews in the western regions bordering the European Union, where, the occasional drone strike aside, the war feels distant. Yet even here, politics intrude. A well-placed source in Kyiv told me the reason no western airport has reopened is that the central government insists Kyiv’s Boryspil must be first – symbolism over sense, in a country that can ill afford either. Tellingly, most of the TikTok videos I’ve reviewed celebrating a return home from Canada and elsewhere are posted by Ukrainians who say they’re from those same quieter western regions.

Yes, a trickle of the disenchanted are already drifting back. But judging by the shuttered cafés and bars here in Odesa, it is nowhere near enough to reverse the scattering I was reminded of this week – one message, five words, an entire diaspora.

The Ukraine we were promised in those Tuesday evening classes – free, independent, happily ever after – was never going to arrive on schedule. But somewhere in Victoria tonight, a family from Kharkiv or Kherson is drinking tea from my mother’s china. I hope the cups last long enough for them to face the choice my parents never had: Not whether they can go home, but whether they’ll want to.