Almost two decades after the last official population census in Ukraine showed that 48.5 million people lived in the country, fresh results of an electronic census were finally released on Jan. 23.
The data showed that only 37.3 million people were present in Ukraine as of Dec.1 in 2019, said Dmitry Dubilet, minister of the Cabinet of Ministers, during the press conference.
“This is the real number of people who are physically present on a specific date,” said Dubilet, noting that the figure doesn’t include Ukrainians abroad, but takes into account foreigners who are present in Ukraine.
At the same time, the electronic census didn’t cover the Kremlin-occupied Crimean peninsula or the war zone in the eastern Donbas regions of Donetsk and Luhansk oblasts.
“But this doesn’t mean that we have forgotten about our citizens who have remained on these territories,” said Dubilet.
The census was conducted with the help of Ukraine’s three major mobile operators, as well as the data of Ukraine’s Pension Fund, to find out how many children under 14 years and pensioners older than 60 years are in the country.
Of the nation’s 37.3 million people, currently 56%, or 20.9 million, are women. There are 3.62 million fewer men. Kyiv is the most populous metropolitan area with 3.7 million people.
“We needed such census as soon as possible in order to properly plan our activities and infrastructure in the country,” said Dubilet.
Previously Ukrainian media reported that the government planned to do a traditional census in the county in 2020. For this, the Cabinet of Ministers proposed to allocate Hr 3.4 billion, or $136 million, and results would be only in 2021. The decision whether to do it or not at the end of this year will be made in the next three months.
“This is not effective for our country. I’ll try to prove to other state officials that we probably won’t go this way,” said the minister.
