Ukraine’s population has fallen by an estimated 8 million since Russia’s 2022 invasion, the United Nations said on Tuesday.
With a birth rate of around one child per woman, Ukraine has “one of the lowest in the world,” said a UN Population Fund director, well below the so-called replacement rate.
Ukraine was already grappling with demographic shifts due to declining birth rates and labor-related emigration, but the war with Russia constitutes a “nail in the coffin,” the Centre for European Studies argued last year: The conflict has led to military casualties (likely in the tens of thousands, though the government has consistently declined to disclose precise figures) and civilian deaths, as well as mass displacement.