According to a UN estimate, Ukraine’s population has shrunk by 10 million since Russia’s first invasion

Geneva – Ukraine’s population has fallen by around eight million since Russia invaded in February 2022, leading to an exodus and a decline in birth rates, the United Nations said on Tuesday. The UN Population Fund said no census had taken place, but there had clearly been a dramatic decline in population war-torn Ukraine.

“Overall, Ukraine’s population has declined by an estimated 10 million since 2014 and by an estimated eight million since the start of the large-scale invasion in 2022,” Florence Bauer, UNFPA regional director for Eastern Europe and Central Asia, said in comments to reporters.

Ukraine’s population was about 45 million in 2014, when Russia first invaded, occupied and annexed Crimea, the agency said, citing data from the National Statistics Office.

By February 2022, when Russia launched its full-scale invasion of Ukraine, the population had shrunk to 43 million, and today it has fallen further to just 35 million, it said, citing a combination of government and UNFPA data.

Speaking to reporters in Geneva, Bauer said the dramatic decline was due to “a combination of factors.”

Even before the war, Ukraine had one of the lowest birth rates in Europe, and like many countries in Eastern Europe, many young people there left the country to seek more opportunities abroad, she said.

But in the two and a half years since the full-scale invasion, about 6.7 million people have fled the country as refugees, while the birth rate has fallen to just about one child per woman, she said.

“This is one of the lowest in the world,” she said, stressing that this is well below the theoretical replacement rate of 2.1 children that each woman on average must have to maintain population size.

At the same time, says Bauer, “several tens of thousands of victims (due to the war) were added, which of course are still to come.”

Neither Ukraine nor Russia have released casualty figures since Russia launched its full-scale invasion in 2022, but U.S. officials estimated in August 2023 that at least 70,000 Ukrainian military personnel had been killed. Since then, Russia has made gradual progress along the vast front line that stretches across the east of the country.