Ukraine - People
By 2023 the population of Ukraine may have fallen to below 20 million people. Since Russia launched its full-scale invasion of Ukraine, over 6.2 million people have left, mostly women of working age, and children. The longer the war lasts, the more people choosing to stay abroad. According to the UN, 8.5 million had left for Europe alone. Add to this three to five million left for Russia. And there were 12.5 million from Crimea and the southeast, which were now outside Kiev’s control. In total that’s about 25 million. There were 42 million people in or around 2014.
According to the UN, Ukraine’s population has decreased by 10 million people, or about a quarter, since the start of Russia’s full-scale invasion due to the refugee outflow, declining birth rates, and war-related mortality. Florence Bauer, head of the UN Population Fund in Eastern Europe, said 22 October 2024 that the invasion in February 2022 worsened an already difficult demographic situation. The birth rate has sharply fallen and is now about one child per woman, which is one of the lowest rates in the world,” she said. According to her, a fertility rate of 2.1 children per woman is needed to maintain a stable population size. Bauer stated that the immediate impact is most strongly felt in regions that have almost depopulated due to the war, villages where only the elderly or lonely people remain, unable to start a family. The largest share of Ukraine’s population decline is due to refugees – 6.7 million Ukrainians currently live abroad, mostly in Europe. Deaths caused by military actions are also a factor in the population decrease.
Ukraine faced demographic problems, and the start of Russia's military operation significantly worsened the situation: since 2014, the number of residents of the country has decreased by more than 10 million people, since February 24, 2022 - by 8 million. The fighting has displaced millions of people both inside and outside Ukraine, with 6.7 million Ukrainians granted refugee status. Further population decline is due to loss of life and an outflow of young people, which has serious economic consequences. Ukraine is losing human capital that is urgently needed to rebuild and build the future of the country.
Demographic decline is even more severe in Ukraine than in Russia. These demographic trends bode poorly for Ukraine’s current and future pool of young men eligible for military conscription, and for its future labor force. The absolute number of 15- to 19-year-old males has been declining since 2002, and is projected to reach an absolute low point – at a level about half the 2002 number – in 2018, but the projected upswing thereafter is remarkably small. The development of the armed forces will be limited by a perpetual slump in the size of the conscription pool.
Even before Russia's full-scale invasion, there were fewer children being born than required to keep Ukraine's population steady. in 2021, before the full-scale fighting, the demographic situation in Ukraine was so dire that the UN recognized this country as one of the most affected by the rapid pace of population decline, recalls the Center for East European Studies (OSW). The key reasons for the decline in the number of Ukrainians since 1990 have been long-term negative birth rates (excess of deaths over births) and extremely large-scale labor migration. By January 2022, there were only 39 births for every 100 deaths in Ukraine. “A slow and uneven recovery could leave Ukraine with a plethora of ‘ghost towns’ on its map – dilapidated places with no prospects for work or development, with widespread crime and violence, and residents forced to struggle with addictions and pathological behaviour patterns,” OSW warned.
The war drastically exacerbated the situation. About 93,500 infants were born in Ukraine in the first half of this year, 28% fewer than during the same period in 2021, before Russia launched its full-scale invasion of the country. While the birth rate in Ukraine had already declined over the past decade, the exodus of the country's female population, along with the security risks linked the war, had a catastrophic impact. According to the worse-case scenario estimated by Ella Libanova, director of the Ptoukha Institute for Demography and Social Studies of the National Academy of Sciences of Ukraine, the current population of approximately 37 million could fall to 26 million over the next 10 years.
According to Ukraine's State Statistics Service, the country's total population of 45,245,900 in January 2014 faced a catastrophic decline of over 2.48 million people to 42,759,300 by January 2015. It's not entirely clear how the agency arrived at the latter figure, and whether it counted the loss of Kiev's control over Crimea and its 1.96 million inhabitants, or the Donetsk and Lugansk People's Republics, which together account for roughly 3,090,000 people. Since the outbreak of the civil war in eastern Ukraine, which has claimed over 6,250 lives, over 800,000 Ukrainians are believed to have fled both western and eastern Ukraine for Russia and Belarus, with thousands attempting to migrate to Europe, and hundreds of thousands more internally displaced.
As in Russia, a mortality crisis has particularly impacted men of working age. In Ukraine, more than one-fifth of men die between the ages of 40 and 60; and in the 40-49 age group, men die at a rate three times that of women. Overall, there are only 0.85 males in Ukraine for every female.
The population of Ukraine has undergone a major decline since the 1990s, due primarily to the low birth rate and emigration. Ukraine’s population totaled 41.4 million people as of July 2021. Approximately 15.2% of the population is age 0-14, 59.5% is 16-59, and 17.4% is 65 years and over.
The population of Ukraine is in decline, with one of the highest world annual depopulation rates of -0.5 percent. A substantial part of this is due to the loss of control over the Crimean Peninsula in 2014, which resulted in a decrease in population of 2.3 million. Moreover, the real number of potential consumers is smaller than the official population numbers suggest. An additional 2.5 to 3 million people are located in eastern Ukraine, which is not controlled by the central government. And, another 3.2 million Ukrainians work abroad, frequently sending money back to Ukraine.
The demographic situation in the country is largely due to the state of the economy and reflects the medical and social conditions of the population, which in turn testify to the state of the economy, the health care system, education, culture, and other factors. As a result, an ageing and unhealthy Ukrainian population will constrain pathways forward for the development of its conscription pool and labor force. Ukraine’s population has been declining steadily since 1990, with a drop of 6.3m people, or 12%, between 1990 and 2012. The United Nations Population Division predicts a continued decline to below 34m by 2050.
Ukrainian population decline by 18,1% over the course of 1990-2017, which is caused by, along with other reasons, decrease in population birth rate by 25,4% and increase in mortality by 19,8%, has been identified. A steady tendency for a decline in the proportion of children’s population up to the age 14 years inclusive for the twenty-seven-year period from 21,5% till 15,5%, and for an increase in the proportion of population aged more than 60 years from 18,3 till 22,9% has been detected. The share of people over 65 in the age structure of population has increased from 12,0% till 16,5%.
Ukraine's dramatically worsening demographic situation in 2013 is set to result in a sharp future decline in the country's working-age population which will mean new economic crises, the consequences of which will be wrought by Western creditors. In an article published 31 May 2015, Forbes contributor Mark Adomanis noted that whatever the present status of Ukraine's economy, "its demographics are in a far more parlous state." Citing statistics from the State Statistics Service of Ukraine and Russia's Rosstat to obligatorily include Crimea and Sevastopol in the count, Adomanis notes that the country's natural population has declined by more than 250,000 between 2014 and 2015. The State Statistics Service's data shows that between January and March alone, deaths exceeded live births by over 62,000 people.
According to the journalist, Western leaders should care about Ukraine's population trends because "the West has set itself the task of underwriting Ukraine's reform efforts. All kinds of commitments (primarily rhetorical but some financial) are being made to assist Kiev's 'European choice,'" and, as a result, a much less populous Ukraine means that "right at this very moment permanent damage is being done to Ukraine's future output."
Citing Western countries' financial commitments to Ukraine, the Adomanis argues that the country's demographic crisis will mean that "Ukraine's future financing needs are going to be much larger than anticipated," with Ukraine's economy having "fewer productive workers in future years," a decline which "is only going to accelerate." Stopping short of saying that the West's efforts to stave off catastrophe are doomed to failure, Adomanis argues that the current trends "mean that the bill for any assistance is likely to be quite a bit larger than originally anticipated."
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