ANALYSIS: Declining Birth Rate, Migration, Mortality: How Will Ukraine Recover?

Russia’s invasion of Ukraine has had a profound impact on Ukraine’s demography.

According to the Ukrainian Institute for the Future, only in the first week of the Russo-Ukrainian War, about a million Ukrainians left the country.

Since President Volodymyr Zelensky introduced martial law, Ukraine’s borders have been closed for men of draft age fit for service so the vast majority of Ukrainian migrants have been women.

Some of those who left in 2022 have returned, but in 2023 a still significant number are leaving for safer places abroad.

As a result of this and other trends, Ukraine’s demographic future looks quite grim. As Ukrainian Minister of Social Policy Oksana Zholnovych said in a recent public forum in Kyiv, Ukraine’s current population could drop by as much as 10 million, down to 25.2 million, in 2050 according to recent projections.

And Ukraine’s going to have to take some major steps if it hopes to reverse things.

Migration and its impact

In the first two weeks of the full-scale Russian invasion, more than 200,000 men returned to Ukraine. Let's remember that the borders in the other direction were closed for them, so they traveled knowing that they would not be able to leave Ukraine until the end of the war. It’s fair to assume that many of them returned to come to the country’s defense.

But this does not change the fact that the current situation with the migration of Ukrainians is, without exaggeration, challenging. In general, migration has always been a sensitive topic for Ukraine. During the times of the USSR and even after its collapse, a significant part of the working population went to Russia to earn money. The balance of migration was close to zero, as people of retirement age returned to Ukraine – however, it was, of course, a loss of labor force.

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Later, people began to go to Europe and other countries to earn money. According to various estimates, labor migration before the Russo-Ukrainian War was from 1.5 to 3 million. And, of course, the number is many times higher at the moment, explained Ella Libanova, director of the Institute of Demography and Social Research named after Mykhailo Ptukha.

“The largest number of migrants are in Germany, Poland and the Czech Republic. If we look at the official figures, after March 10, 2022, the situation stabilized. There was no longer such a mass outflow of the population, but the migration continued anyway. Currently, there are more than 4.5 million Ukrainians in Europe, and some have moved on. That is, there are currently around 6.5 million people outside of Ukraine. This is the last number. It is bad that in 2023 the number of people who are registered under the law of temporary protection has increased by half a million. That is, the process continues, it is not as lively as at the beginning of 2022. But it still continues. People keep going. And the main question is how many people, and how we will be able to return them after the war,” Libanova said.

Declining birth rate

In any country at any time, war affects security and the standard of living.

Planning a child during a war is difficult. Plus, there’s migration – women left abroad; men stayed here.

If we move away from migration – for the married women who stayed in Ukraine, many of their husbands went to defend the state. If, before the war, an average of 1.16 children were born per Ukrainian woman, now this ratio has decreased to less than one.

Ukrainian officials are attempting to increase the birth rate. The parliament recently registered a draft law on increasing payments for the birth of a child by almost 10 times. It is not known where the money will come from. And whether it will help in reality is equally unclear, because it does not directly address the root problem of many men being at war and many women being abroad.

And finally, the Ukrainian population is decreasing because Ukrainians are being killed.

We do not know how many civilians have actually died, as a large part of Ukraine is still occupied. The victims of shelling, murder and torture are at least tens, and perhaps hundreds of thousands.

It is also unknown how many of Ukraine’s defenders have died in this war.

In addition, we must not forget about the missing persons and prisoners, whose fate is currently unknown. And even if we knew the number of lives that Russia has taken in Ukraine, we do not know how long the war will last and how much more horror it will bring.

What to expect next

The state can encourage fertility or encourage people to return to Ukraine, but people will likely choose safety and reliability first.

Various measures, many of them post-war, will have to be undertaken to encourage Ukrainians to live and build families in Ukraine. Last week, the Demographic Future of Ukraine forum discussed several potential strategies. They included:

• Encouraging growth in the birth rate by offering more support for families
• Reducing the number of people dying early by improving health care and educating people about health
• Getting more people to come to Ukraine – particularly by encouraging the Ukrainian diaspora to return to their homeland and by attracting foreigners to join Ukraine’s workforce
• Helping internally displaced Ukrainians integrate and settle down
• Developing mechanisms to improve the health/well-being of the elderly and encouraging them to stay active and involved in the workforce – particularly by creating flexible working conditions
• Improving the general quality of life – by bringing the war to an end, finding affordable housing for people, increasing people’s economic independence, improving infrastructure, and creating a socially cohesive environment

One of the main problems will be that labor is needed everywhere.

Businesses, if not the capitals of foreign countries, will likely attempt to keep the working hands of Ukrainian migrants for as long as possible.

And 70 percent of the women who left Ukraine have a higher education, so, maybe not immediately, but over time they have or will likely manage to find good careers abroad, Libanova said.

And many have already managed to build new lives for themselves abroad.

“They are comfortable and may not plan to return. It should also be understood that part of the population has husbands in Ukraine – and it is possible that when we open the borders, they’ll go [abroad] to their wives and stay there. Of course, patriotism is quite developed in Ukraine, but many families will go. But I hope that at least half will return. If 60 percent come back, it will be just a holiday,” Libanova said.

How many Ukrainians will return from abroad and how many will create families, will depend on what kind of policy Ukraine adapts and what kind of country it builds. It will depend on how well Ukraine fairs economically, on how many jobs are available, and on whether what Ukraine offers can compete with what’s offered by other countries. Couples will be enticed or deterred to start families in Ukraine based on these factors. And, perhaps it goes without saying, but the foremost factor will be how Russia’s war in Ukraine concludes.