The Mayor of Kharkiv
The mayor of Kharkiv, Igor Terekhov, said in an interview with TSN that after the victory, 95% of departing Kharkiv residents plan to return to the city. He emphasized that despite shelling and power outages, there is no mass exodus of residents, and according to his data, 55% of those leaving intend to «return by the summer».
Return to Kharkiv
Earlier, Russian sources spread information about queues of cars leaving Kharkiv. The mayor refuted this information, citing footage from 2022 when indeed hundreds of thousands of people left the city. At that time, the population of Kharkiv decreased to 400,000 (before the war — 1.4 million).
Since then, people have been returning to the city en masse. In 2022-2023, there were four waves of Kharkiv residents returning:
- The first wave in the spring of 2022, when the Ukrainian Armed Forces liberated settlements in the north of the region that were shelling residential areas of Kharkiv.
- The second wave. As a result of the Kharkiv counteroffensive in September-October 2022, practically the entire previously occupied territory of the Kharkiv region was liberated. Artillery shelling of the city ceased. Kharkiv residents began to return even to the most shelled areas, such as Pivnichna Saltivka. According to Governor Oleg Synyubov’s estimates, the population increased to 1.1 million people.
- The third wave. It took place around the beginning of 2023. The population of the city was estimated at 1.2 — 1.3 million people.
