KIEV, November 7. /TASS/. The number of village residents in Ukraine is consistently plunging. A growing number of villages have disappeared or have become uninhabited, First Deputy Head of the parliamentary faction of the Servant of the People Party Alexander Korniyenko said on Thursday.

"It is an undisputable fact that the number of Ukrainians is plummeting, and this is sorely felt in villages. The number of farmers is steadily declining, though official statistics does not fully reflect this process. According to the State Statistics Service of Ukraine, 426 villages vanished over the past 15 years, and 369 more became deserted, but they were not removed from the state records," Korniyenko wrote in his column in the newspaper Ukrainskaya Pravda.

He added that 4,684 more villages are on the brink of extinction, where as many as 50 people had lived in 2015, and in 22,000 villages the population is less than 1,000 people. According to Korniyenko, difficult living conditions are the reason behind it. "The infrastructure created in the Soviet era became obsolete or could not live up to new realties. The quality of education and medical services plunged, as did employment prospects," he said. As a result, Korniyenko said, the economically active population have been abandoning villages in search of jobs. He said that 2 million out of 5.6 million rural residents left their communities and became labor migrants.