Alexander Lukashenko urged Belarusians to work diligently and called on employers to pay their staff on time, warning that “we’ll keep losing people” otherwise:
“We’ve had about 10,000 to 12,000 people move to Poland. “Though, [they say], a million have left. I’d like to see that…” Lukashenko said on November 6, 2025. A video of the politician’s remarks at the opening of the renovated bridge in Mazyr was released by his press service.
Reporters with the Weekly Top Fake project found that Lukashenko cited incorrect figures. Eurostat data show that in 2015, about 11,000 Belarusian citizens were permanent residents of Poland, and over the past decade that number has grown sevenfold. In just the past five years, their number has jumped two and a half times: from 30,000 in 2020 to 75,000 by 2025. However, securing permanent resident status requires at least five years of living in the country — except for holders of the Polish Card, who are eligible for a fast-track procedure. In other words, the 75,000 are only those who have already settled in Poland.
A clearer picture of the scale of migration comes from data on the number of first-time residence permits issued to Belarusians. These are documents issued for the first time that allow a foreigner to stay in the country for more than three months — including work, student and humanitarian visas, as well as residence permits. Across the EU last year, Belarusians received 175,000 of these permits. Poland accounted for 150,000 of them. Until 2020, Polish authorities were issuing about 40,000 to 50,000 first-time permits a year to citizens of Belarus. The surge came in 2021, when 130,000 were granted, and in 2022 the number jumped to 285,000.
Getting a permit doesn’t mean a person actually entered the country, or, if they did, that they stayed for long. Some people work abroad for a period of time and then return to Belarus. Still, the number of Belarusians officially employed in Poland and paying social insurance contributions is higher than Lukashenko claimed: Polish statistics put it at up to 135,000 people. That’s roughly 10 times more. It’s also worth noting that not everyone works officially.
After 2020, Belarusians began leaving for Russia in greater numbers as well. EAEU statistics show that the number of people heading to the eastern neighbor for work grew until 2016, then interest in Russia declined, and starting in 2023 began rising again. In just the first half of 2025, a record 100,000 Belarusians left for jobs in Russia — the highest figure in the past 13 years. And that counts only those who showed up in the migration authorities’ records.
Belarusian migration authorities have their own data on those who left for all destinations.
“More than 200,000 citizens left Belarus in 2021–2022. These are different reasons: residence permits, the IT relocation wave, their family members, and so on. So yes, it’s a large number, because these are people of working age,” said then head of the Interior Ministry’s Citizenship and Migration Department, Alexei Begun, on January 18, 2025, on ONT.
Belstat also released such data for the first time in five years. According to the agency, 32,000 people left Belarus for permanent residence abroad in 2024. Most of them were from Minsk.