Opening the Border for 18 to 22 Year Olds: Ukraine's August 2025 Exit Decree and Temporary-Protection Grants to Young Ukrainian Men in the European Union. A Descriptive Note After a Registered Stop Rule Fired

From 28 August 2025 Ukraine allowed men aged 18 to 22 to leave the country under martial law, while men aged 23 to 60 remained barred. This note describes what followed in Eurostat monthly data on decisions granting temporary protection to Ukrainian citizens by sex and age band. The study was planned as a triple difference on the official EU27 aggregate, in an unpublished plan whose timing cannot be verified, but the plan's stop rule fired on first contact with the data: the aggregate had only 7 of the 19 required pre-period months, below the minimum of 15, so no confirmatory test is reported. After seeing the missing-cell pattern and one outcome estimate (0.450 log points on the 7 available EU27 pre months), a post-data amendment moved the analysis to the sum of the 26 member states other than Hungary (EU26); every estimate below is exploratory. On EU26, the contrast of men 18 to 34 against women of the same age and against men and women 35 to 64 was 0.47 log points higher in September 2025 to August 2026 than in January 2024 to July 2025 (95% HAC interval 0.26 to 0.69), about 77,000 grants above a comparison-group benchmark of 108,000, concentrated in Poland, Germany and Czechia. The contrast was already drifting upward before the decree, and two exploratory adjustments give smaller values: subtracting the mean time-placebo step gives 0.28, and extrapolating a linear pre-decree trend leaves a mean post-window gap of 0.32 (0.23 to 0.41, slope-change model), large in September 2025 (0.69) and indistinguishable from the trend from May 2026 in pointwise 95% forecast intervals (0.05 in August 2026, interval -0.08 to 0.19). The planned boys-versus-girls 14 to 17 placebo failed (-0.48, interval -0.65 to -0.31), and young women's grants also rose relative to older women's. The rise in grants to young men coincides with the decree; the design does not establish how much of it the decree caused.