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Between 2018 and 2026, our journalists received 11 Belarusian Volnaye Slova Awards.
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"Welfare tourism": RTR-Belarus miscounted Ukrainian freeloaders in the EU
We examined the statistics and found out just how wrong the channel's reporter was.
Most Ukrainian refugees who moved to European Union countries don't want to work, RTR-Belarus claimed in a news segment. We examined the statistics and found the opposite.
On the talk show "Opinions" on RTR-Belarus, Ukrainians who fled to the EU from the war Russia launched were called freeloaders. The episode featuring a segment on how Poland, among others, began cracking down on them to put "an end to welfare tourism" aired on October 12, 2025.
"The statistics don't lie: 80% of Ukrainian refugees in Germany don't want to work. In the Netherlands and Poland, the numbers are only slightly better — more than 70% of these guests prefer to remain on welfare," the voiceover stated (the segment's authors weren't identified; host Ihar Pazniak presented the piece as "a report from our reporters").
In Germany, the figure cited in the talk show is close to reality. According to August data, just over two-thirds of working-age Ukrainian citizens who sought refuge there had no official employment. But in other countries, the situation is different.
In the Netherlands, 6 out of 10 refugees are employed, according to the country's statistics office. In Poland, 7 out of 10 working-age refugees are employed: the country's Central Statistical Office counted around 700,000 Ukrainian workers last year. In the Czech Republic, about half of the 393,000 Ukrainians with temporary protection status are employed.
