By Peter Baker, Washington Post Foreign Service
The Washington Post, Washington, D.C.
Sunday, April 25, 2004; Page A15

Mikulintsi is not a ghost town, but there are days it feels like one. Here in western Ukraine, where job opportunities are sparse and salaries meager, the only recourse for many people is to find work abroad, particularly elsewhere in Europe. So the expansion of the European Union this week right up to the Ukrainian border, less than 100 miles away, has only deepened anxiety about the future here.

Tighter borders will make it harder for Ukrainians to travel abroad for work. And with three of its neighbors, Poland, Slovakia and Hungary, joining the EU on Saturday, many Ukrainians feel left out, once again on the wrong side of what they commonly call a new Iron Curtain falling across Europe.

"We're not expecting anything positive from this," said Tetiana Dovbush, a schoolteacher whose classroom was filled with children whose parents are off working elsewhere in Europe. "Nobody expects any doors to be opened for Ukraine. Nobody expects anything to be better. The EU isn't thinking of us. Their main concern is how to close the doors permanently."

Coming just weeks after the expansion of NATO, the accession of 10 new EU members, mostly from the ranks of former Soviet-bloc countries, will create what officials and diplomats call a "gray zone" of 65 million people from Ukraine, Belarus and Moldova, three former Soviet republics trapped between Europe on one side and Russia on the other.

The three countries left out of both entities often seem unsure which way to turn, veering in different directions by the day. Snubbed by the EU, Ukraine's parliament last week ratified an agreement creating a still-undefined union with Russia, Belarus and Kazakhstan called the United Economic Space. Yet at the same time, Ukraine this month approved a new memorandum of understanding with NATO outlining mutual cooperation, and last week banned the Russian language on Ukrainian television.

Without the more developed economies of the rest of Europe or the oil resources of Russia, the countries of the gray zone struggle to get by. When it comes to average wage earnings, a report by the Federation of European Employers, published last month, found that Ukraine, Belarus and Moldova ranked 44th, 45th and 46th out of 46 countries surveyed.

The Ukrainian economy has been growing, yet 86 percent of Ukrainians surveyed last year by the International Foundation for Election Systems, a Washington-based group that receives U.S. government grants, still deemed the country's economic situation bad or somewhat bad.

The feeling of resentment about being left out of the EU expansion is particularly acute among Ukrainians in the western part of the country, a picturesque expanse of charming old towns and pastoral landscapes that was part of Poland until the Soviet-Nazi pact in 1939. "We're the buffer," Dovbush lamented. "As it's always been. This is the most dangerous place."

Hryhoriy Burbeza, a city council member in the regional center of Ternopil, takes it personally. "Why don't they want to receive well-prepared European people from Ukraine?" he asked. After a moment, he came up with his answer. "It's the selfishness of Europe."

Western Ukraine has been feeding labor into Europe for years. A government survey of 994 villages in the Ternopil region in 2001 found that 50,000 people, out of a population of 1.1 million, were leaving each year to find work abroad. Nearly a third of those living abroad were in Poland, now just days away from joining the EU, which requires member states to follow stricter rules on border controls and migrant workers. All told, the expatriate Ukrainians reported sending back about $100 million a year to their families in Ternopil, a figure some experts said represented only a fraction of the real amount.

Oleksandr Levchenko, co-author of the survey of Ternopil villages, said those Ukrainians may be forced out by the expanded EU and sent back to Ternopil, where the average monthly wage of $66 ranks it lowest in all of Ukraine.

"They'll come back and they'll demand work and the government can't provide them with this work," he said, sitting in a Ternopil restaurant named Cafe Europe. Pondering the message from the West, he added: "This doesn't make any sense. On the one hand they say, 'Turn your back on Russia, turn to Europe.' But the road to Europe has been blocked."

Ukrainians have been traveling down that road for more than a decade, ever since the collapse of the Soviet Union opened up borders and closed down factories. At first, mostly men went. But in recent years, local officials and residents say, women increasingly have been the ones seeking work abroad, often leaving behind children and warping social structures in villages unaccustomed to life without sisters, mothers and wives.

Burbeza's wife has been working elsewhere in Europe for the last two years, sending money and parcels home to the children. "They miss her," he said. "But somehow we cope with it."

Teodozii Onyskiv counts 18 households with someone working abroad among the 36 in his neighborhood. His wife, Olena, went to Italy, where she and her sister took care of elderly people and cleaned houses. Olena made $600 a month, far more than her husband's monthly pension of $46. "People who work abroad send a lot of money back," said Onyskiv, 50, a burly, balding retired police officer. "If you use it in a proper way, it makes a lot of sense."

But Olena grew ill in Italy and eventually came home, where she died of cancer at 48. In front of his house, Onyskiv built a small one-room chapel in her memory.

At least some of the exodus from Ukraine can be traced to human trafficking and sex slavery. Last month, a married couple, both of whom worked as schoolteachers, were convicted in Ternopil of selling young Ukrainian women to brothels in Turkey. The husband received a 61/2-year sentence; the wife was given three years' probation. "They tried to solicit girls from villages, young good-looking girls, from 19 to 25," said Sergei Shvornikov, an official at the regional interior ministry.

Such stories are increasingly common. Criminal cases against human traffickers have doubled in Ukraine each year since 1998, with 289 cases prosecuted last year. "There's no work," said Marina Pasechnik, coordinator of a program that fights human trafficking in Ternopil. "They have nothing to feed the children with. So human traders move in."

Even women who depart voluntarily often leave children behind. Dovbush, the teacher, estimated that one-third of the students in her school have no mother at home. She notices more drinking and smoking among her students, more trouble at earlier ages. Some have more money because of the funds sent home from abroad and seem less attentive to authority.

"A lot of families have fallen apart in the last few years," Dovbush said. "As a rule, our men can't handle loneliness very well. They start drinking and going downhill. . . . There are families where they have complete tragedy."

No one is quite certain how the new EU iron curtain will change all that. Some worry that it will mean only more misery and less opportunity. Others assume that Ukrainians will find new ways to scale the wall.

"Unless big factories start working in Ukraine again or Ukrainians start getting good salaries, people will still be going overseas, even illegally," Pasechnik said. "The money they get abroad as illegal immigrants is still better than the legal money they can earn here."