Ukraine's population in flux as war deaths outpace demographers' counting

War is chaos that denies any certainty. A new missile attack can happen any minute, or the Russians can blow up a dam, and the next attempts to somehow structure reality will be futile.

However, in this chaos, the state must function, and international partners must calculate the amount of financial and humanitarian aid. To do this, they need at least some guidelines on the number of people.

hromadske talked to demographers, the UN Refugee Agency, and border guards to understand how many Ukrainians there are now, during the war, and how many there might be after it ends.

War as a starting point

Recently, at the request of the government, the Ptukha Institute for Demography and Social Studies of the National Academy of Sciences of Ukraine made a forecast of the demographic situation in Ukraine until 2037.

Hold on, you may say. Does the Institute know when the war will end? No, they don't. But when making the forecast, they assumed that it would last until the end of 2024 or early 2025.

"We had to start from something," says Oleksandr Hladun, Doctor of Economics, Deputy Director of the Institute for Demography, "We determined by expert means when the war might end. This is one of the starting conditions of the forecast, but also one of its risks. Without this date, the forecast is impossible." 

According to the demographer, if the war ends sooner or later, the Institute will make a new forecast.

In the meantime, the result is as follows: there are 37,630,000 Ukrainians. By the beginning of 2025, the number is projected at 33,633,000 people.

Naturally, one wonders how demographers managed to count the population in the midst of the chaos of war. With the dead, the foreign-born, the missing, the forcibly displaced?

Black holes of the occupied territories

The last census in Ukraine was conducted in 2001. And, as Oleksandr Hladun correctly notes, "the estimates given by the State Statistics Service on January 1 of each year, based on the data of that census, were questionable."

Or the following point: what territory of Ukraine should be considered the base for calculations? The one controlled by the government in 2023 or the one within the 1991 borders?

Neither, according to the State Statistics Service, and it collects data on the natural movement of the population, taking into account, in particular, the Russian-occupied territory of Donetsk and Luhansk oblasts (although since 2014 Kyiv has not known exactly how many people are there), and excluding the territory of Crimea. But Crimea is Ukraine! Yes, from a political point of view. But apparently not from a statistical point of view.

"The State Statistics Service uses data from government agencies to register demographic events. In Crimea, registration is carried out by the authorities of another state. These data cannot be used by our government agencies. Therefore, since 2014, the data on the number of people are given without Crimea. As for the data on the occupied Donetsk and Luhansk oblasts, they are as of 2014, as if they were ‘frozen’," explains Hladun.

Although there is some data on the peninsula: in 2014, the occupation authorities censused all the residents there. To what extent the Russians falsified them is an open question. Nevertheless, the Institute for Demography relied on these data when making its forecast. And they calculated the number of Ukrainians within the 1991 borders-with the black hole of the occupied territories.

Counts on the border and beyond

Accounting for Ukrainians who have moved abroad poses the greatest challenge for demographers. Since February 24, 2022, relevant official data on this population comes from two sources: the State Border Guard Service and the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees. However, the discrepancy between these numbers has confounded demographers, leaving them struggling to accurately determine Ukraine's current population.

"While before the full-scale invasion, an average of 60,000-70,000 people crossed the border with the EU and Moldova (excluding the Transnistrian segment) in both directions per day, in the first months after February 24, passenger traffic in these directions reached 130,000 per day, and up to 85% of them left the country," says Andriy Demchenko, a spokesman for the State Border Guard Service. “In those days, the border crossing requirements were simplified by agreement with the border guards of neighboring countries. It was possible to leave with any identification documents, even driver's licenses."

According to Andriy Demchenko, 42.5 million cases of crossing the border between Ukraine and the EU and Moldova have been recorded since February 24. Almost 37 million of them were Ukrainian citizens. Moreover, 19.8 million were registered for exit, and 17.2 million for entry.

So, are there 2.6 million Ukrainians still abroad? No! After all, border guards do not record the number of citizens, but the number of border crossings. And these can be not only refugees, but also volunteers or civil servants or soldiers sent for treatment, etc.

EU's double counting

So how many refugees are there? And can the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees give an accurate answer?

When collecting relevant data, this Office relies on information from government agencies in EU countries that host Ukrainians. And here is another interesting point. The EU has allowed Ukrainians fleeing the war not to stay in the countries where they originally arrived, but to resettle freely throughout Europe.

"It is quite possible that people are registered in several countries as a result of moving. In addition, local authorities are often not interested in reporting that refugees have left their territory, because funding depends on it. Such cases have been recorded in certain European countries. That is, sometimes we have double registration of Ukrainian refugees in Europe," notes Oleksandr Hladun.

As a result, according to the UN, in the spring of 2023, there were 5 million Ukrainian refugees in the EU, which is significantly more than the number reported by the State Border Guard Service. So, which institution's data should demographers use for their calculations?

There is another point to consider with regard to refugees: women who left for Europe pregnant in 2022 and gave birth to children had to be registered at the relevant diplomatic missions of Ukraine, just like deceased refugees. Diplomatic missions have to pass this data to the Ministry of Foreign Affairs of Ukraine, from there it has to go to the Ministry of Justice, and then to the State Statistics Service. Only then can demographers freely use it.

The chain is evidently too long to be efficient. Moreover, in order to get to the diplomatic mission and submit information about the newborns/deceased, their relatives often need to travel across the foreign country, which is an additional hassle that not everyone is prepared for. Therefore, the Ukrainian State Statistics Service still knows nothing about the fate of many citizens.

Ukrainians have fled not just to the EU but also to Russia since February 24. According to Russia, more than 2.8 million Ukrainians left for its territory in 2022 - a figure the UN High Commissioner for Refugees uses. However, it remains unclear how many of these departures were voluntary or forced; the statistics are silent on that distinction.

Ukrainian experts estimate only around 1 million Ukrainians actually ended up in Russia in 2022.

So how did they count anyway?

To make a forecast of the development of demographic processes for the government, demographers had to rely on three indicators: births, deaths, and migration.

At the end of 2022, the Ministry of Justice provided the following data: 195,146 people were born, and 541,739 people died. This is data only from the territories controlled by the Ukrainian government, excluding the occupied territories.

As for the number of migrants, the Institute for Demography used an average of the UN and State Border Guard Service data - 3.7 million people. It is assumed that only 40% of them will return to Ukraine after the war ends.

"We made our population forecast based on 2022 data, the experience of other wars and countries, as well as our hypotheses about further developments," says Hladun.

It is predicted that in 2023-2025, the mortality rate will exceed 20 people for every thousand, and demographers consider this figure to be critical for the country. As for men aged 25-35, demographers are already talking about super-mortality in this age group.

To calculate the birth rate, the number of women born in Ukraine in the 1990s and 2000s was taken as the number of women who are currently of childbearing age, as well as the number of children that one woman can give birth to during her lifetime.

It is expected that the birth rate in Ukraine in 2023 will be dramatically low, with only 71 births per hundred women. And this situation will persist throughout the war period and for at least a year after the war.

In order for the population not to decline, it is necessary for 100 women to give birth to 210-220 children (i.e. more than two children per woman - the so-called threshold of self-reproduction of the population - ed.)

At the same time, the average life expectancy in Ukraine in 2023-2024 is also critically low: 57.3 years for men and 70.9 years for women.

It is predicted that after the war, it will begin to grow gradually, but only in 2032 will it be able to reach the pre-COVID period - about 67 years for men and almost 77 years for women.

At the beginning of independence, there were 52 million Ukrainians, in 2022, the population was estimated at more than 42 million, and in 2023 there are only 37.6 million. And as of 2037, there may be barely 30.5 million.

The first sentence of the Institute of Demography's text "Forecast Estimates of the Population of Ukraine" prepared for the government encapsulates its limitations — and reassures: "This forecast is a rather approximate estimate."

Author: Maya Orel