Worse than the Holodomor: Ukraine’s government finally admits the greatest population collapse in modern history
Ukraine’s Ministry of Social Policy recently admitted devastating levels of depopulation in government-controlled territory, estimating the current population at ~22–25 million.
Let us take a second to fully appreciate how completely insane and unprecedented this population collapse has been. In 1991, when Soviet Ukraine left the dissolving Union, there was a population of ~52 million—a reduction of close to 60% over three decades, with the majority of the reduction happening during peacetime, accelerating after increased Schengen access.
One of the darker undercurrents of the war has been the transfer of millions of culturally compatible women and children to low fertility EU countries, with countries like Poland benefitting massively from the labor force replacement. Europe has effectively cannibalized Ukraine’s work force, and has shown very little moral reckoning with that fact.
Yes, many other post-communist states experienced massive population declines as well, but even compared to countries like Latvia and Bosnia, Ukraine stands out. For comparison, Bosnia’s population has decreased from ~4.3 million in 1991 to ~3.2 million now, a devastating drop of about 25%, but still nowhere near Ukraine’s 50%+ drop, and that’s even with bloody civil war and ethnic cleansing.
Given that the Ukrainian government purposefully hasn’t conducted a census in 25 years, it can be hard to fully track population numbers over time, but even before 2022, estimates were in the low-30s to high-20s of millions, meaning that even before the invasion the population had dropped by 40%+ in ~30 years.
For context, Harvard’s MAPA demographic atlas estimates that about 13% of Ukraine’s population was lost during the Soviet collectivization famines, aka the Holodomor. During WWII, Ukraine’s population went from ~42 million to ~30 million, which is devastating but still far lower than the 52M to 22M collapse of the last thirty years. By raw numbers, capitalism, nationalism, independence, and Western alignment have hollowed out and devastated Ukraine even more than Stalin and Hitler did, combined.
“Corpses aren’t the same as emigrants,” you might say. There’s a reason why the Irish held wakes before relatives emigrated, and it still holds today. My Ukrainian student from Nikolaev who made $300/mo in Ukraine is not going back there after making $300/day in Houston, Texas.
You also might say that I’m not accounting for population losses in Donbass and Crimea. OK, add the 7 million there back in—that’s still 52 million to 29 million, still unprecedented in modern history, and more importantly, those 7 million will not be added back in reality. They are now on Russia’s ledger for the foreseeable future.
And as far as those old canards about “Ukrainian agency” and “centering (on-message) Ukrainian voices,” your friend has agency to jump off the local bridge, but that doesn’t mean you should encourage or enable him to do it, or listen to the people telling him to jump.
Somehow, those “Ukrainian voices” don’t include my Nikolaev student who said he was “definitely never going back there,” or the random young woman from Donetsk who I watched get shelled for years on Instagram before moving to Moscow, the Ukrainian woman I met in Moscow who now refuses to acknowledge that she’s originally from the Ukraine, the Armenian nurse from southwest Ukraine who complained about post-Maidan linguistic policies and eventually moved to the UK with her child to work as a medical translator, my student from Kiev who felt pressure to speak Ukrainian instead of Russian around certain friends and family and heavily resented it—no, these “Ukrainian voices” are almost always NGO-adjacent, Atlanticist, pro-war, etc. The actual messy lived reality of everyday Ukrainians and other post-Soviet peoples, the “Просрали всё” opinions, the “They stole the country from OUR President” people—none of them matter, just the media-trained PMC profiteers.
And finally, as to Russia’s role, Russia was never going to allow Ukraine to be even de facto integrated into NATO without a fight, just like America wouldn’t tolerate a hostile communist government in Canada or Mexico. The thermodynamics of geopolitical reality don’t care about your moral idealism or “totally unprovoked and illegal full-scale invasion” incantations. You might as well argue about the morality of it raining when humidity gets high enough.
The Ukraine which entered the 20th century was a young, rural society with large families and high birth rates. Soviet industrialization and urbanization did much to dampen those advantages, but they still existed in part through much of the twentieth century, allowing Ukraine’s population to rapidly expand back to and then above prewar totals during the 1950s.
Ukraine in 2026 has exactly none of these advantages, and what makes the current demographic catastrophe far more threatening to the survival of Ukraine as a viable state and national project is the specifics of who left and who stayed. It would be one thing to rebuild a country of 22 million young people. That is not what Ukraine is, as revealed by the Ministry of Social Policy.
Out of the 22 to 25 million people remaining in government-controlled Ukraine, there are 13 million unique recipients of social payments, including 10.2 million pension recipients. Assuming the lower-end estimate for total population, this means that 46% of Ukraine’s remaining population is retired. The most recent birth rate was estimated at below 6 births per 1,000 inhabitants, which puts Ukraine at the extreme lower end of global fertility, below Japan and right around South Korea, but Japan and South Korea are rich countries at peace, not poor countries at war.
As the elderly are the most likely to stay, so are the young and educated the most likely to leave. Almost as soon as visa-free Schengen access opened up in 2017, a massive outflow of young workers began which never really abated. Even before the war, people joked about the seemingly endless number of Ukrainians in places like Poland and the Czech Republic, and these were disproportionately younger workers, including young families—in other words, exactly the people Ukraine needs the most for its fiscal, economic, and demographic future. And for every young scholar and worker who left, there seems to have been a babushka who stayed behind, stubbornly collecting her pension in her Soviet apartment.
This would be a demographic catastrophe and severe crisis even in a country where everything else is going right, but Ukraine is not that country. Ukraine has massive debt burdens, ongoing inability to pay for its own budget, massive infrastructure damage from the war, ongoing casualties, and ongoing loss of territory and population. True, there might be very few people in the land Russia is now taking, but there’s very few people in all of Ukraine.
To be clear, Ukraine is already a basket case and extremely dependent vassal state staring down a good hundred years of IMF payments and “fiscal and economic restructuring.” What the latest announcement from the Ukrainian government has shown is that even government officials can’t pretend that the nation isn’t a zombie anymore.
Government propaganda can no longer hide the fact that the basic viability of Ukraine not only as an independent state but also as a national people capable of reproducing itself is at serious risk, if not already destroyed. Even assuming severe austerity, massive inward migration after war, and a doubling of the birth rate, the future is still extremely grim.
Ukrainians themselves have been acutely aware of these issues for a long time. One of my Ukrainian students explained to me how little guilt he felt about leaving Ukraine because “there’s nobody left anyway.” It’s impossible to watch your country’s population get reduced by half over 30 years and not notice it.
This issue has been studiously avoided by Western propaganda and pro-Ukraine cheerleaders in the media, because to honestly reckon with it means to reckon with the fact that they’re cheerleading a national suicide which has already destroyed the future of the country. Yes, Ukraine is still fighting, and often bravely and well. No one has ever doubted the bravery of Ukrainians.
But “technically still fighting” does not mean viable or victorious in any world, human or animal. Nazi Germany was “technically still fighting” even when Hitler’s bunker was being surrounded by the Red Army. You can keep putting guns in the hands of old men and teenagers long after you’ve already strategically lost the war.
This is a worst-case scenario for Ukraine and Ukrainians, regardless of whatever pro-EU, pro-NATO propaganda anybody puts out. Some might say, “This is the price of separating from Russia, the remainder has more sovereignty now.”
This is pure delusion. There is absolutely no sovereignty in being totally dependent on foreign financial and military aid. There is no sovereignty in trying to repay massive debt with a 46% retired population. There is no sovereignty in your few remaining men violently coercing your other few remaining men to go to the fronts to hasten the demographic collapse on behalf of Western sponsors.
Making Ukraine unviable is also a strategic victory for Russia, as whatever territory remains pro-Western will be a permanent basket and charity case. Ukraine has “detached itself from Russia” like a tumor detaches itself from an otherwise-healthy body under a scalpel.
Almost none of the Marvel-brained State Department liberals who’ve cheerled this murder-suicide pact from the beginning will have to live in post-war Ukraine. Jack the six-figure-income Democrat from Virginia won’t be repaying the IMF loans for the next one hundred years, if anything, he will be leading the “restructuring” to gut the babushkas’ pensions. Despite tweeting about Ukraine from sunrise to sundown, academics like Timothy Snyder have more or less ignored the dark realities of the current demographic collapse, as well as their colossal implications.
The chickenhawks in the West got their war with Russia, NATO generals got to literally aim the rockets and missiles against the Russians with the Ukrainians pulling the trigger, they got to masturbate to FPV killcam videos, they got to pretend that for once in their lives they weren’t the monsters, that they weren’t the bad guys, that they were on the side of good.
The wars in Gaza and Iran have more or less completely destroyed these humanitarian illusions, but some nonetheless try to maintain them with Ukraine. The facts speak for themselves, and have for a very long time. Becoming a battlefield between East and West has never been in the interests of common Ukrainians, from the Great Northern War until now. Ukraine has suffered massive devastation due to inter-imperial rivalry numerous times throughout its history.
Any responsible Ukrainian ruling class would thus try to avoid repeating that fate, but the post-Maidan elites were far more concerned with securing Western sponsorship and their own rule against domestic rivals than they were with long-term strategic planning.
The career diplomat, the nepobaby journalists, the think-tankers, all of the pencil-pushing, air-conditioned “humanitarian interventionist” DC chickenhawks in America get to still live in America afterwards. They get to keep their think tank jobs in a demographically, economically, financially, and militarily viable country. They get to live in populated cities that have basically functioning societies.
In fact, the War in Ukraine has been an outright bonanza for not just defense contractors but also certain types of academics, think tankers, and journalists, especially ones with relevant field experience. Before the war they might’ve been freelancing and adjuncting, but after they could often walk straight into intelligence work, as Charles Murray’s kid, Bennett Murray, did at the comically evil sounding “Reaktion Group” which offers “live combat trials” to defense firms and NATO governments.
When I discussed Ukraine with Bennett years before the war, he claimed that Ukraine would “get to join NATO” after “winning a land war against Russia.” Similarly, a former diplomat working in an expensive new international relations center at a major public university disclosed to me that NATO enlargement was currently foreclosed, barring “kinetic action,” nudge nudge, wink wink.
Well, the results are pretty much in, boys. Did they “win” a land war against Russia? What do you think?
The Ukrainian people will get none of that. It is they who have paid almost all of the real costs of the conflict, it is they who have been scattered throughout the Western world to be absorbed and deracinated, it is their nation which is in total free fall, rapidly hurtling towards extinction.
Sections of the Ukrainian elite no doubt have escape plans ready to be implemented, if not already implemented. The peak days of wartime corruption profitability are already over. Given current and future conditions, you’d have to be insane to invest capital into Ukraine, and they no doubt know this better than anybody else.
Any levelheaded realist could have seen this coming—and many did, not just Mearsheimer. When both Henry Kissinger and Noam Chomsky agree that neutrality would’ve been best, it’s not horseshoe theory as much as just basic cognitive ability detached from propagandistic framings. We were derided as tools of Putin, as genocidaires even, as the worst of the worst, but we have always known that those who call themselves “Ukraine’s best friends” are actually its worst enemies, and that the common Ukrainian man was always going to be the one to pay the price for white-collar bloodlust in the Anglosphere.
God save the Ukrainian people, for DC, Brussels, and Kiev certainly won’t—the path they’ve laid out is for Ukraine to exist as a conflict zone and armed camp against Russia, a type of vojna krajina to keep the Eurasian horde at bay, or a “big Israel,” as Zelensky called it. This military frontier will be 50% pensioners, apparently. Jesus wept.
