The war is exacerbating a demographics decline that had already started well before Putin ordered his troops across the border
Jamie Dettmer is opinion editor at POLITICO Europe.
How many of the almost 5 million Ukrainians who’ve fled overseas will return when the war finally ends?
It’s a question gnawing at the country’s politicians, who’ve tried coming up with ways to entice Ukrainian refugees to return home. It’s also occupying the thoughts of Ella Libanova, one of Ukraine’s leading demographers.
Libanova fears the war is exacerbating a depopulation crisis that had already started well before Russian President Vladimir Putin ordered his troops across the border to subjugate a country he claims doesn’t really exist. And while, to his surprise, Ukraine has proven itself many times over, the war isn’t going to help overcome the long-standing demographics challenge it’s faced with.
Before the war — even before Crimea’s annexation and Russia’s occupation of a swathe of the Donbas in 2014 — Ukraine was experiencing a disturbing demographic decline. It isn’t alone in its trajectory either: Since the fall of the Berlin Wall, Europe’s former Communist countries have seen dramatic falls in population. Bulgaria, Latvia and Lithuania have seen the sharpest declines, with drops of more than 20 percent; Estonia and Romania have seen declines of 16 percent; Croatia of 11 percent and Hungary of 8 percent.
While much of these declines has been due to young people leaving for better economic opportunities, another cause has been plummeting fertility rates — and notably, that’s the case with Ukraine. “We haven’t been giving birth to the necessary number of children,” Libanova told POLITICO in an interview last year. “The death rate has been bigger than the birth rate since 1991.”
“Each next generation shrinks a little less but is [still] smaller than the previous one. And now, because of the war, there are many children who should have been born who will never see the light of day,” she added.
Of course, labor migration has compounded the dilemma as well. From 1991 — the year of Ukraine’s independence — to 2020, around 3 million of the country’s citizens became economic migrants, many of them heading to Poland. Eventually, around half-a-million returned because of the repercussions Covid-19 had on their jobs, Libanova explained.
And on top of that, life expectancy in Ukraine is the lowest in Europe — especially for men — due to “smoking, alcohol, bad nutrition, employment in toxic environments and high mortality from road accidents,” Libanova said.
In 1991, Ukraine’s population was 52 million. By 2015, it had shed 10 million. And now, the war is significantly worsening demographic prospects: As of 2024, the United Nations estimated Ukraine’s population was down to 37.9 million. In fact, some demographers hazard it could now be below 30 million — if only counting Ukraine-controlled areas.
In the war’s first year, however, polling by both Ukrainian and European sociologists rosily suggested most of those who fled would return, with some optimistically estimating 80 percent to 90 percent would do so. Libanova never really trusted those predictions — she initially suggested Ukraine could count itself fortunate if it saw a 50 percent return rate. “That would be fantastic,” she said.
Three years later, she now predicts it will likely be closer to 30 percent — similar to the rate of return seen after the Balkan Wars of the 1990s. She suspects the hopeful forecasts were the result of the patriotic fervor harbored by those who had fled and the discomfort of admitting to anyone, including to themselves, that they might remain in their new homes unless they’re forced to leave by their host countries.
Former Minister of Foreign Affairs Dmytro Kuleba is even more pessimistic. Shortly after he resigned last year, he told President Volodymyr Zelenskyy Ukraine would have a huge demographic challenge. “I was always telling him — the president never agreed with me — that our only hope would be to import people from other countries,” Kuleba told POLITICO in a recent interview.
“I think most Ukrainians who’ve fled have gone for good, and we can’t really count on them to come back. Every family will sit down and draw up a list of arguments in favor of returning or not. But for the mothers, there will be that big question about uprooting their children again after they’ve made new friends, learned the language of their new homes and integrated,” he said. Moreover, as many of them now have jobs, they’ll have to reckon with opportunities being better where they are than in Ukraine, trying to recover from war.
Anecdotal evidence collected by this columnist suggests Kuleba may be right. For the past three years, I’ve asked more than a hundred Ukrainian refugees whether they plan to return, and their responses have shifted over time, from a first-year “yes,” to a second-year “maybe,” and a third-year “probably not” or flat “no.”
“It’s a huge problem,” opposition lawmaker Mykola Kniazhytskyi agreed. And he faults the government for not thinking ahead and doing more to encourage people to stay in the first place.
“Unfortunately, our government doesn’t have any program for supporting people who’ve been displaced inside Ukraine, so they’ve had little option but to become refugees. [The government] hasn’t helped with housing or building apartments. And for the kids outside Ukraine and in school in other countries, not enough has been done to help ensure they don’t forget the Ukrainian language and their history to help maintain the ties,” he complained to POLITICO.
Legislation that Kniazhytskyi sponsored to address these issues has been languishing in parliament for more than a year now. “Other lawmakers don’t understand how important it is,” he said.
For her part, Libanova believes it was a good thing that people left when the war began. “It saved them. It prolonged their lives — not just by not being killed by a bomb, but their health [will] be better for the future, and they will have longer life expectancy,” she said.
The dual mission now is to find ways “to get them back when the war finishes, and to try to dissuade husbands or male partners from leaving Ukraine to reunite with [their spouses] and their children,” she added. If Ukraine fails in that, its demographic prospects will be grim indeed — especially since many of the mostly female Ukrainian refugees are of child-bearing age.
Libanova also expects the death rate will worsen in the coming years — and not just because of battlefield casualties. “Even more … will die from heart attacks and strokes due to stress, depression, poor nutrition and not receiving prompt medical attention from a stretched medical system,” she said.
The total loss is almost impossible to ascertain, but Libanova estimates that by 2030, Ukraine’s population won’t stand much above 30-or-so million — and even that depends on when the war finally ends and how.
