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.
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