Ukraine Stares Down he Barrel Of Population Collapse

Hoscha (Ukraine) While many Ukrainian hospitals are struggling to cope with the never-ending influx of injured people, a maternity ward in the western town of Hoshcha remains eerily abandoned.

In the hospital in Hoşça, the number of births has been only 139 so far this year, compared to 164 in 2024; That’s a far cry from just over a decade ago, when more than 400 babies were born each year, according to local officials.

“Many young men have died,” gynecologist Yevhen Hekkel lamented in his office. “Frankly, it is young men who need to replenish Ukraine’s gene pool.”

Empty maternity wards and men mobilized for war: Ukraine’s population is rapidly decreasing

As Ukraine moves toward demographic disaster, officials are grappling with a crucial question: When the war is over, who will be left to rebuild the shattered country?

While hundreds of thousands of people have been killed and injured in the conflicts that have been going on for nearly four years, millions of people have fled the country and births are decreasing.

Hoşça, a small town with a population of around 5,000, is hundreds of kilometers away from the nearest front, but still faces the full severity of the population crisis.

In the nearby village of Sadove, a school that once educated more than 200 students was closed.

“Two years ago we had to close this institution. Why? Because there were only nine children there,” Hoshcha city council chairman Mykola Panchuk told Reuters.

Millions of people needed to rebuild

Ukraine’s population, which stood at 42 million before the full-scale invasion in February 2022, has already fallen below 36 million, including several million in Russian-captured areas, according to the demography institute at the National Academy of Sciences of Ukraine.

This figure is estimated to drop to 25 million by 2051.

The collapse is accelerating.

According to 2024 projections from the CIA World Factbook, the country has both the highest death rates and the lowest birth rates in the world: approximately three deaths for every birth.

According to government estimates, male life expectancy in Ukraine has fallen from 65.2 years before the war to 57.3 years in 2024. For women, this figure decreased from 74.4 to 70.9.

Experts and politicians say Ukraine will need millions of people to rebuild its shattered economy and defend itself in the post-war future if Moscow attacks again, as many Ukrainians fear.

The Kiev government attempted to address the crisis last year by outlining a demographic strategy for 2040. The document warned that Ukraine would face a shortage of 4.5 million workers over the next decade. Sectors that need the most workforce include construction, technology and administrative services.

The strategy focuses on improving housing, infrastructure and education, as well as preventing further migration and withdrawing Ukrainians from abroad, including attracting immigrants from other countries if jobs are not filled.

Officials estimate that these measures could increase the population to 34 million by 2040, but warn that if current dynamics continue, the population could fall to 29 million by then.

faces of the fallen

During Reuters’ visit in October, portraits of martyred soldiers lined the road leading to Hoşça’s town hall.

An old woman wiped her tears and laid flowers on a picture on a cold autumn morning. A steady stream of people, mostly middle-aged or elderly, was passing through the main street.

Panchuk from the city council said that 141 people from Hoşça and the surrounding region, where about 24,000 people live, have been killed in the war since 2022, while 11 people have died fighting against Russian-backed militants in Eastern Ukraine since 2014.

Marianna Khrypa, principal at one of the two remaining schools in Hoshcha, said the number of first-year students had fallen and about 10% of school leavers, mostly boys, had gone abroad.

“Parents are taking their children out of the country before they turn 18,” he said. Although Kiev banned most men over the age of 18 from leaving the country during the war, President Volodymyr Zelenskiy raised the age to 22 in August.

Ukraine, whose population exceeded 48 million in 2001, was facing demographic decline long before the conflict; Millions of citizens were heading west from Eastern Europe to escape economic strife and widespread corruption within the country.

When Russia invaded, migration accelerated, causing millions more to flee.

The Center for Economic Strategy, a Ukrainian think tank, said in March that about 5.2 million Ukrainians who had left since the invasion remained abroad, mostly in European countries including Russia, Germany and Poland.

The center predicted that 1.7 to 2.7 million of these people would remain abroad, and when the war ends, they could be joined by hundreds of thousands of adult men who are not currently allowed to leave Ukraine.

Oleksandr Gladun, deputy director of the demography institute of the National Academy of Sciences, said that the population crisis has been further exacerbated by the disproportionate representation of young women among refugees since 2022.

Independent estimates are alarming: Ukraine’s population is expected to fall to 9 to 23 million people by 2100, according to estimates published by the UN in 2024.

Villages were evacuated, houses were abandoned

Hoşça hospital’s maternity ward lost state funding in 2023 after failing to reach its target of 170 births per year: “We had one child born 15 minutes late, so we had 169,” said council president Panchuk.

The neighborhood is now kept afloat with the amount the municipal council can allocate from its own budget.

The unpredictability of war has been a major deterrent for people deciding whether to start a family.

The head of the maternity ward, Inna Antoniuk, said that about a third of the women who came had husbands serving in the military, and some were dead or missing.

As Russian forces gradually advanced and the front lines in the east and south moved slowly, Moscow increased missile and drone attacks across Ukraine, causing widespread damage to civilian, energy and military infrastructure.

Hoshcha’s population has not visibly decreased, Panchuk said, in part because surrounding villages have emptied and residents have headed into the town as local schools, clinics and other services are closed.

Many houses are abandoned on the road to the village of Duliby, less than 10 km (6 miles) from Hoşça.

Local resident Oksana Formanchuk said that even in this small village of fewer than 200 residents, nine people were mobilized to fight.

Formanchuk stated that among them was her husband, who has been missing since July, and that she feared that her two adult sons would also be drafted into the military.

“What if they were taken away too? What would I do without them?”

‘There is nothing to build on’

Anastasiia Yuşçuk, 21, who serves coffee in a minibus on Hoşça’s main street, said that many of her friends are hesitant about having children. Although he hopes to start a family someday, he said he has no intention of doing so in the next few years.

“There’s no stability, there’s nothing to build on.”

He said existing financial pressures, such as rising rents and the cost of living, were made worse by the war.

“It’s very difficult for young people to buy a house now. Both me and my partner need to be financially stable, and the situation in the country changes every month, every two months, so it’s hard to plan.”

Panchuk’s deputy on the city council, Anastasiia Tabekova, has a husband who serves in the army.

“A few days after I found out I was pregnant, my husband mobilized,” she said. “They allowed her to attend the birth. She left with tears in her eyes.”

He said children can provide hope for the future.

“I know many women whose husbands fight, I know women whose husbands are unfortunately no longer with us,” she added. “They’re holding on, some are in therapy, for some their child is a moment of joy, a reason not to give up.”