- Ukraine’s population level has plunged since Russia invaded
- The nation already had one of Europe’s lowest birth rates
- But millions have since fled, and the birth rate plummeted
Ukraine’s population has shrunk by more than 10 million since Russia launched its brutal invasion in February 2022, the UN said on Tuesday.
The UN Population Fund said there had not been a census, but that there clearly had been a dramatic population decline in war-torn Ukraine.
‘The Ukraine population has declined by over 10 million since the beginning of the war,’ UNFPA’s regional director for Eastern Europe and Central Asia Florence Bauer told reporters in Geneva.
She stressed that the decline had been seen ‘since the beginning of the full-scale invasion’, and was due to ‘a combination of factors’.
Already before the war, Ukraine had one of the lowest birth rates in Europe, and like many countries in Eastern Europe, it had seen a declining population, as young people left in search of more opportunities, Bauer said.
But since the war, some 6.7 million people fled the country as refugees while the birth rate fell to just around one child per woman, she said.
‘That’s one of the lowest in the world,’ she said, stressing that this was well below the theoretical replacement rate of 2.1 children that each woman on average must have to maintain the population size.
At the same time, she said, there are the ‘several tens of thousands of casualties (from the war), which of course add to the equation’.
The UN’s announcement came as Ukrainian officials revealed Russian drone and artillery attacks killed five people, including a child, in the eastern Ukrainian regions of Sumy and Donetsk.
Sumy lies across the border from Kursk in Russia, where Ukrainian troops launched a major offensive in August and have been holding swathes of territory.
‘Three people, including one child, died as a result of a night-time attack by enemy drones on residential buildings,’ regional authorities said, referring to the city of Sumy.
‘This Russian terror can be overcome only through unity with the world,’ Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky said in response, urging allies to supply more weapons, including air defence systems.
He also called for ‘investments in weapons production in Ukraine’ and ‘long-range strikes on Russian military logistics, military airfields and bases of Russian troops’.
Separately, emergency services in the eastern Donetsk region, where Russian forces are steadily advancing, said two people had been killed and another wounded by Russian shelling on the town of Myrnograd.
The Ukrainian air force said 60 Russian drones in total had been detected in Ukrainian airspace overnight and into Tuesday morning and that 42 were destroyed.
Sumy, which borders Russia, has been under persistent bombardment since the beginning of the war in 2022, when Russian forces briefly captured sectors of the industrial territory before being pushed back.
Authorities there said more than two dozen Russian drones had been shot down there overnight.
The Ukrainian operation in Kursk is part of a broader roadmap to end Russia’s invasion of Ukraine recently outlined by President Volodymyr Zelensky.
