UN: Ukraine's population dropped by 8m since 2022
The population of Ukraine has decreased by 8 million people since February 2022, not by 10 million as Florence Bauer, the Regional Director for Eastern Europe and Central Asia of the United Nations Population Fund (UNFPA), said earlier at a briefing in Geneva, TASS reports with reference to the updated data released by the United Nations Office at Geneva
The source reported, “Overall, Ukraine's population has declined by an estimated 10 million since 2014 and by an estimated eight million since… 2022.” The UN noted that ‘already before the war, Ukraine had one of the lowest birth rates in Europe’. At the same time, the country saw ‘many young people leave in search of more opportunities abroad’. Ukraine’s population was ‘aging, and its total population was declining’. That situation was common to the Eastern European region, where many states had experienced ‘unfavourable demographic trends for decades’.
According to the UN, since February 2022, the demographic situation in Ukraine has become worse. The birth rate ‘has fallen to just around one child per woman’, and that was ‘one of the lowest in the world’. At the same time, ‘millions of people were displaced internally’, and about 6.7 million have fled the country as refugees. “Some regions have been depopulated with young people leaving, and mostly the elderly remained. A significant number of people have died as a direct result of the war,” Ms. Bauer said. “This also presents a huge loss in human capital that is urgently needed for recovery and building Ukraine’s future.”
The UNFPA experts believe that ‘to effectively plan for Ukraine’s recovery, a population census is urgently needed, once security allows’. The last census was conducted in Ukraine in 2001, making updated demographic data ‘critical’.
Earlier, speaking at a briefing in Geneva, Florence Bauer said that the population of Ukraine had decreased by more than 10 million people since February 2022. After that, the UN press service corrected the figure and released a new text of Ms. Bauer's statement.
