Business Update: Railway stations, airports prepare to reopen as lockdown slowly lifted


People prepare to enter a train at the Zoloti Vorota metro station in Kyiv on the first day the local authorities opened the subway after two months of shutdown on May 25, 2020.

Unemployment has increased during the COVID-19 lockdown and there are now an estimated 3.5 jobseekers for each available job in Ukraine, according to the latest research into the job market carried about by VoxUkraine. One problem area that researchers point to was the closure of almost all public transport since March, which sent unemployment soaring, putting an estimated 500-700,000 more Ukrainians out of work, according to the Ukrainian Chamber of Commerce and Industry (UCCI).  

As of May 26 the official number of unemployed in Ukraine is at 506,000, according to the State Employment Service. Over the past week, the number of officially registered unemployed people increased by 19,600 and as of May 26 it had passed half a million. This was reported by Interfax with reference to the data of the State Employment Service. The UCCI puts the real number of unemployed in Ukraine closer to 2.2 million and multiple experts say that the sheer number of Ukrainian workers who are employed in the so-called “grey economy” makes tracking unemployment hard.