How much population Ukraine will lose after the end of the war

The deputy director for scientific work at the Ptukha Institute for Demography and Social Research of the National Academy of Sciences of Ukraine, Oleksandr Hladun, has said that Ukraine will face a significant population decline in the coming years.

He said that together with other experts he had modelled the possible situation by 2037. However, he stressed that the obtained figures are approximate, as no one can say with certainty how long the war will last.

We determined the birth rate and mortality rate by expert judgement, and we also evaluated the number of migrants very critically and with discussions. When we made the forecast, the first question we had to determine was how long the war would last. No one has a real answer to this question," said Alexander Gladun.

He explained that forecasting in the existing conditions has its own specifics. The number of the population in 1991, when the country had approximately 42 million people, was taken as a starting point.

The forecast period is now divided into three parts: the duration of the war, 2-3 years after the end of the war and four years or more after that. To develop the forecast, we roughly determined that the war would end in late 2024 or early 2025. We took into account the ORDLO, Crimea, Sevastopol, as well as the fact that after the last census (2001) we had labour migration abroad. People left en masse to earn money and stayed there permanently - this is about 2-3 million people," he said.

The specialist pointed out that after all the indicators were taken into account, he and his colleagues came to 30.5 million people by 2037.

So we predict a reduction in the population by 11 million," said Deputy Director of the Institute of Demography.

At the same time, he stressed that this forecast has a projected error of 1 million people, as it is not known exactly when the war will end.

The importance of this forecast is that it defines the very trend - the rapid reduction of Ukraine's population," he added.