Troeshchyna is a down-at-the-heels late Soviet moonscape that happens to be located on the fringe of Kyiv, though it is indistinguishable from hundreds of other socialist neighborhoods built in the 1960s, 1970s and 1980s anywhere between Berlin and Beijing. This Brezhnev-era district has almost no distinguishing features other than the Ukrainian capital's most robust and scraggly markets. Walk by one of Troeshchyna's neighborhood elementary schools, such as School 247, and something looks not quite appropriate for this part of the world. The school's playground will be chock full of kids from countries and cultures not traditionally associated with the central Dniepr, including children from Afghanistan, Angola, Korea, Mongolia and Vietnam. Kyiv's post-independence migrants generally fall into one of three groups. First, migrants from formerly socialist countries and countries sympathetic to the Soviet Union arrived as students or guest workers of various sorts at the end of the Soviet period and remained in the Ukrainian capital. Second, refugees (both officially recognized and not) fled conflicts in other regions of the former Soviet Union, the Balkans, and the Middle East and settled in Kyiv. Third, "irregular migrants" of various sorts have made their way into Ukraine, often in search of an easy route into Europe. Illegal trafficking in migrants has grown over the past decade as Ukraine has become an alternative route into Europe to migration circuits disrupted by the Balkan wars of the 1990s. Migrants have followed a variety of routes to the Ukrainian capital, sometimes overstaying legal visas, other times purchasing illegal "packages" from criminal "travel agents" abroad, or arriving with the help of forged documentation and bribes. Still others merely rushed through seldom-patrolled Black Sea ports and Ukraine's largely unguarded frontier with Russia. Whatever their initial intent, and however they arrived, life's normal ebbs and flows have conspired to encourage tens of thousands of individuals migrants to settle in Kyiv and to build new lives for themselves in Ukraine.

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Ukraine refugee migrants experience illegal immigrant migrant worker immigrant population