Is marking Ukraine as dark grey some kind of soft political statement here? Various countries outside of the EU are simply white (which makes sense, their gpd is not relevant for inta-EU comparison), but Ukraine specifically is dark grey, meaning “data not available”.
As far as I know, Ukraine would not be part of the area covered by Eurostat. But I could be mistaken, of course. Has Ukraine historically been part of such reports or has there been an on going partnership with the Ukrainian office for official statistics?
Both cases would be interesting, but the former would certainly be more exciting. I would certainly interpret it as some kind of “Ukraine belongs to Europe!”-statement.
Maybe OP knows more.
Those maps sometimes also cover EU candidates like Albania, Serbia or Georgia, and Ukraine has been a candidate too since quite recently.
On the source it says this data is reported by countries, it’s not some central calculation. Maybe they expected data from the grey countries but didn’t get it? There is data from Serbia and Montenegro, and they are not part of the EU, nor candidates.
Eurostat is not only for EU countries, it has a lot of agreements with other European countries: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eurostat#Geographical_scope
