Migration Security and Regional Socio‐Economic Resilience in Ukraine: Dynamics, Differentiation and Implications

Vollständiger Abstract

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ABSTRACT Ukraine presents a critical case for understanding how migration processes shape regional socio‐economic resilience, yet no regionally explicit framework has previously linked internal and external migration security to territorial differentiation across its oblasts. This article addresses that gap by developing a composite regional indicator integrating internal and external migration security dimensions, applied to 24 oblasts over 2010–2021, that captures both the scale and directional influence of migration on regional resilience. Results reveal substantial differentiation that does not follow conventional macro‐regional lines: mean values range from 0.826 in Kyiv oblast to 0.421 in Zakarpattia, yet western and eastern industrial oblasts differ little as groups (0.606 and 0.630) relative to the spread within each, with Chernivtsi, a western border oblast, ranking second nationally and Ternopil, a western agrarian oblast, ninth. Level and temporal stability prove largely independent: the most volatile region, Kharkiv, moved repeatedly between the top and the bottom of the national distribution, while cross‐regional dispersion widened over the period, indicating divergence rather than uniform decline. Extended to 2022–2024, a separate contextual analysis drawing on aggregate official, IOM and UNHCR data examines how far this pre‐war geography corresponds to the uneven consequences of wartime displacement, with 10.5 million people having fled Ukraine and 3.7 million internally displaced by August 2024; the correspondence is partial, and this extension is interpretive rather than a formal causal test. The framework provides both a replicable measurement tool and an empirical baseline for post‐war regional recovery analysis.