About 500,000-600,000 have left Belarus after 2020 election – sociologist

May 8, Pozirk. About 500,000-600,000 Belarusians left their country after the 2020 presidential election by January 2024, Hiennadź Koršunaŭ, a social scientist and former director of the National Academy of Sciences’ Institute of Sociology, concluded in his study for the Center for New Ideas.

Koršunaŭ studied available data from countries that shelter Belarusians. After 2020 about 120,000 Belarusian nationals settled down in Poland, 50,000 in Lithuania, 8,000 in Germany and 25,000 in other EU countries. In addition, 11,000 Belarusians moved to Georgia and 5,000 to Israel.

The scientist noted that Russia was probably the main destination but it was “almost impossible” to determine the number of people who have gone to Russia.

“Even official bodies can give very different figures on the number of Belarusians working in the Russian Federation in the same timeframe. For example, there can be significant gaps in the data for 2022: the Eurasian Economic Commission’s department of labor migration gives the figure of 174,305 Belarusians, while the Russian Interior Ministry’s Main Department of Migration gives 430,000.

“The only thing that can be said more or less confidently: emigration from Belarus to the east can be quite comparable with the west,” he noted.

The total number of emigrants, 500,000-600,000, is about 6-7 percent of Belarus’ population, Koršunaŭ said.