The country’s birth rate has collapsed. The separation of couples, with millions of women and children leaving the country, has been compounded by male mortality.
A funeral in the Donetsk region of Odesa, Ukraine, on 4 February 2024
26 February 2024 — The demographic crisis is here to stay. Two years after the start of the massive Russian-led invasion, Ukraine’s population is continuing to decline, with no immediate hope of reversing the trend. The country’s population is currently estimated to be between 33 and 35 million, but no precise count can be done due to the Russian military occupation of 20% of its territory.
The lowest estimate, 33.7 million, comes from the International Monetary Fund, while official Ukrainian statistics cited 35 million on January 1, 2024 – an exact count “to within 200,000 individuals,” according to Oleksandr Gladun, deputy director of the Ptoukha Institute of Demography and Social Sciences. This number encompasses Ukrainians living within the internationally recognized 1991 borders, in other words including Crimea, and the regions of Luhansk, Donetsk, Zaporizhzhia, and Kherson still occupied by the Russian army. But the number falls to only 31.1 million if the count is limited to residents within the territory remaining under Ukrainian government control.
Ukraine is losing people in many ways: Soldiers killed or missing at the front, civilian victims of bombings, soldiers taken prisoner, forced population displacements in areas occupied by the Russian army, children separated from their parents and sent to Russia – not to mention the 6 million Ukrainian civilians, mainly women and children, who have left the country. Indeed, the longer the conflict goes on, the greater the likelihood that exiles will settle in their host country.
Right before February 24, 2022, the country had a population of 41 million, although this number is disputed. The last census was carried out in March 2001, and the Ukrainian government has been repeatedly postponing this politically explosive exercise ever since.
Gravediggers work without end
To this day, one of the great unknowns remains the number of Ukrainian servicemen killed in combat. Forced to wage an existential struggle against a numerically superior aggressor who does not shy away from any war crime, the Ukrainian state had chosen to keep its military losses quiet to reduce the demoralizing effect on the population, particularly on men of fighting age. All men aged between 18 and 60 are forbidden to leave the country.
Inevitably, the accumulation of deaths is becoming more and more visible. Every day brings its share of mourning announcements on social media. In every cemetery, gravediggers have been unendingly digging out the shapes of fresh graves topped with the two-tone blue and yellow flag, in tribute to fallen soldiers.
NGOs, open-source research units, and allied Western governments are also reluctant to assess and disclose Ukrainian military losses. Only US military authorities circulate estimates sparingly. The latest, leaked in August 2023 by the New York Times, put the death toll at almost 70,000. On February 25 2024 however, President Zelensky said during a press conference that 31,000 Ukrainian soldiers had been killed in two years.
In contrast, Russian propaganda publishes grotesquely exaggerated numbers daily, without ever backing up its assertions. In January, the Russian Defense Ministry, which never reveals its losses, put forward the figure of 215,000 Ukrainian servicemen “eliminated” since February 24, 2022.
“We can’t count on a baby boom”
Since then, the only detailed accounting has been based on the work of an anonymous and controversial group, published on the Ualosses.org website. Regularly updated, the list contained 46,940 names on February 26, 2024. Each soldier’s file contains surname, first name and patronymic, dates of birth and death, military rank, and unit name. In-depth analysis shows that, in 65% of cases, these files are complete or almost complete, and 70% are supported by at least three sources (most often, obituaries from local Ukrainian news sites).
Nevertheless, the quality of sources is very uneven. Around 10% of the pages provided come from a single source, Lostarmour.info – a Russian propaganda site.
Contacted by Le Monde, a representative of Ualosses.org claims that the goal is to “finally provide a rigorous measure of Ukrainian losses” from open sources. The organization, which employs “a team of three people joined by volunteers (…) receives no funding,” he argued. On the Ukrainian side, this database is completely ignored. Ihor Solovey, director of the Center for Strategic Communications and Information Security (a branch of the Ministry of Culture) summed up the official view succinctly: Ualosses.org “bears the signature of the GRU [Russian military intelligence].”
Polemics aside, the high mortality rate among men, combined with many women of childbearing age leaving for foreign countries, points to a major trend. According to data from Kyiv’s Ptoukha Institute of Demography and Social Sciences, fertility is now at an all-time low, with 0.9 children per woman in 2023, compared with 1.2 in 2022. For its director, Ella Libanova, Ukraine should have no illusions about a rebound phenomenon: “We can’t count on a baby boom, there won’t be one,” she said. “If there were one after the war, which I’m wishing for, I’d eat my two doctoral theses.”