Ukrainian refugees / Photo: Getty Images
Ukraine has lost 10 million people in two and a half years of war, a quarter of its population, according to a UN report released on Tuesday. According to Reuters, at the start of Russian aggression on 24 February 2022, the country’s population was 40 million, but 30 months later it had fallen to 30 million.
The main reasons for the demographic decline are the mass exodus of refugees, a decline in the birth rate and significant losses at the frontline. Florence Bauer, representative of the United Nations Population Fund in Eastern Europe, emphasises that Ukraine’s birth rate is now one of the lowest in the world, at around one child per woman.
There are now 6.7 million Ukrainian refugees living abroad, mostly in Europe, which has become the largest factor in the population decline. War casualties also had a significant impact on the demographic situation, although accurate data on the number of deaths is difficult to obtain. Preliminary estimates put the number of war casualties in the tens of thousands.
Back in the Soviet era, Ukraine’s population exceeded 50 million people, but like other post-Soviet countries in Eastern Europe and Central Asia, it has been gradually declining over the past decades.
According to Bauer, the full impact of the war on the demographic situation in Ukraine will only be known after the conflict is over and a comprehensive census is conducted. In the meantime, many regions of the country are already seeing the consequences – villages are virtually deserted, with mostly elderly people left behind.
The situation is similar in Russia, which had a pre-war population of over 140 million. Although demographic problems in the country existed before, the war has made the situation much worse: in the first six months of this year, the birth rate in Russia was the lowest since 1999, which even the Kremlin described as “catastrophic”.
