Page 9 - UKRRptAug21

Soviet Union, at its lowest point Russia’s population fell to the same level as in 1985. By comparison Ukraine’s population has collapsed and has fallen to a size last seen in 1959. It has given up about two thirds of all its population growth following WWII.
As bne IntelliNews reported in the “Putin’s babies” feature, Russia’s population was expected to collapse from 144mn in 2000 to as little as 77mn by 2020, as it was losing 750,000 people a year. But what happened was the Mother and Child reforms introduced by Russian President Vladimir Putin n 2006 stopped the rot and reversed the trend. Russia’s population enjoyed a decade of growth that only came to an end in 2018 as the demographic dent arrived in the working population and the various crises in recent years have depressed birth rates and immigration again, although mortality rates continue to fall, while life expectancy continues to rise.
Russia’s population has started to shrink again but the UN’s optimistic forecast for 2050 is for the population to shrink modestly from the current 148mn to 144mn, although the pessimistic prediction is for a more severe contractions to 125mn.
By contrast Ukraine’s population has been in uninterrupted collapse since 1991, falling from a peak then of 51.9mn to the current 41.9mn, according to the official Ukrstat numbers. And even that number is in doubt.
Ukraine’s population fell behind that of Poland for the first time as an electronic census revealed the number of citizens has dropped by some 5mn people to 37.289mn in 2020 since the last census in 2000.
The size of the population has been a matter of speculation for several years. Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskiy promised to hold a census in 2020 as part of his election manifesto but cut some corners and held an electronic census last year instead. The size of the population was also shrunk by some 4mn after Russia annexed the Crimea in 2014.
But even ignoring these problems, the demographic curve shows that Ukraine’s population has been in uninterrupted decline since 1991, and took an even sharper downward step in 2014 following the 2014 Revolution of dignity.
Comparing the demographic pyramids of the two countries and the 1990s dent is clearly visible in both. But what as concerned demographers is a second dent has been put in both pyramids by the 2014 crisis that sent the whole region into a recession from which it only started to recover in 2018. And in Ukraine’s case that crisis was made even worse by the Euromaidan revolution that lead to Ukraine’s economy contracting by 17% y/y in the first quarter of 2015 – a shock almost as large as the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991.
Ukraine’s population catastrophe has only been inflamed by the introduction of visa-free travel by the EU – by far the most popular reform won by former President Petro Poroshenko during his term in office. That has lead to massive labour outflow as a total of some 3mn Ukrainians moved to Poland and the other Central European countries to find work. Another one million have also left the eastern Donbas region, fleeing the undeclared war raging there since 2014, most of them moving to Russia, which is now offering them accelerated citizenship.
9 UKRAINE Country Report August 2021 www.intellinews.com