I was skeptical when I saw that the number of “millionaires” in Ukraine has increased by 61% over the past year.
The statistic was just too on the nose for a narrative for it to be taken at face value. If true, the propaganda value for Ukraine war opponents would be obvious.
It turns out that, as far as we can accurately determine, the statistic is indeed correct, although it doesn’t quite mean what you would initially think, given the definition of “millionaire” in this context.
“The number of millionaires in Ukraine has increased by 61%.” https://t.co/N7s4NcXTXQ
— Ivan Katchanovski (@I_Katchanovski) May 5, 2025
It took a modest amount of poking around to parse out the truth, and to be honest, in the current information environment, I wouldn’t take any statistic at face value. The 61% figure is not especially reliable, but the large rise in declared income is quite real.
The Ukrainian government has reasons why it might want to fudge the numbers, as do other players like the Americans, the Europeans, and, of course, the Russians as well. In war, truth is the first casualty. So take every statistic with a teaspoon of salt.
But let’s take a look at the data we have and try to figure out what it means.
First, the definition of “millionaire:” the term refers to people with over a million Ukrainian Hryvni in declared income, which translates to somewhere around $26,000, so “millionaire” in this context doesn’t mean what you probably think it means, by about a factor of 50. Of course, all other things being equal, living in Ukraine is not nearly as costly as living in the US, so a person making $26,000 in Ukraine lives substantially better than one living here.
Second, inflation in Ukraine is 12%, so a surge in the number of people reporting higher incomes is, in and of itself, not necessarily indicative of people becoming genuinely wealthier, but could indicate that both prices and incomes are rising, and perhaps not entirely in parallel. If people’s incomes are not keeping pace with inflation, a nominal increase in their income can still translate into a decline in real purchasing power. I can’t say for sure how those two factors interact, especially since a devaluation of the Ukrainian currency has substantially increased the costs of imports.
Third, there is a huge gap between the number of people whose income is reported and the number of working Ukrainians. Of course, this implies a gross underreporting of the number of millionaires because the higher one’s income, the greater the incentive to misreport income, and lots of people apparently don’t report their income at all. Total tax revenue from all sources is less than $25 billion, meaning that about 3/4 of Ukraine’s budget is from outside sources (including you and me).
In other words, tax and income reporting are pretty unreliable in Ukraine. Take any number for what you will.
Put it all together and you get a whole lotta nothing. The “millionaire” numbers only show that for average people in Ukraine–assuming you aren’t living in the war zone and don’t get hit by a random Russian bomb–the economy and life don’t suck as much as you think. Life is going on there. I wouldn’t want to be in Kiev because I am chicken, but for all the hype, the place isn’t anything like Gaza or Yugoslavia during the civil war. In fact, for most people, the privation is not great at all, as the economy is being propped up and there is substantial economic growth. It was 5.5% in 2023, and about 3% last year.
Now for the bad news: the people benefiting from the war are not these “millionaires,” who probably equate to upper-middle class Ukrainians, but the corrupt billionaires and government officials who are skimming off the top. Ukraine is notoriously corrupt at the best of times, and the war has only made it worse. No doubt Ukraine’s government and our own know who is making bank off the war, and every once in a while, you see stories of officials caught with millions of dollars in cash stored up somewhere, but the scale of the corruption must be huge.
It is always huge in wars, even in Western countries. An inherently corrupt country like Ukraine must, logically, be much worse.
Opposing the war in Ukraine on this basis alone seems a bit churlish, although even supporters of the war should admit that this is a problem and efforts to root it out should be as vigorous as possible. But if you can find a proxy war that any country in the world has engaged in where massive corruption was not present, I salute you.
Corruption is the rule, not the exception, in human affairs. So finding war profiteering going on in Ukraine is like finding that there is gambling going on in Casablanca.
I’m not excusing Ukrainian corruption in the least, and almost laugh when people claim that saving Ukraine is tantamount to saving Western Civilization. Hardly. It is a corrupt, oligarchic regime, more along the lines of Russia than the United States on the spectrum of free to unfree countries. There are ample reasons to support the war without resorting to fantasies about the virtue of Ukraine’s government.
You can argue that a non-Russian-dominated Ukraine is in our strategic interests, but not that it is remotely like the US or Europe in governance. You can argue that Ukraine is morally superior as a state to Russia–I think it is–but that is a relative term. It’s still pretty bad.
What you can’t do, though, is argue that the problem is that the growth in Ukrainian “millionaires” is proof of much at all, other than that Ukrainians are doing much better than the average resident of a war-torn country. Foreign aid has kept the economy and even the standard of living humming along about as well as is humanly possible, and much better than most countries involved in armed conflict. If you consider Ukraine an ally, that is a good thing. If you don’t, then it seems like a waste of taxpayer money and simply a way to keep the bleeding going on longer than it might.
After all, Ukrainians and Russians are still dying, which is more important than the fact that for the average Ukrainian, the economy is doing pretty well, all things considered.
