Ukraine's birth rate plummets to 300-year low as country’s population collapses

Ukraine’s population collapsed to 29mn souls last year, according to Ukraine Business News, with just 187,000 births recorded (including in Russian-occupied territories). This is the lowest annual figure in recorded history over the last 300 years, exacerbating an already dire population catastrophe facilitated by economic turmoil and war.

Ukraine's demographic crisis dates back to the Soviet collapse in 1991, when the country’s population stood at 51.9mn. Economic crises and labour migration saw the country’s total fertility rate plummet to 1.4 births per woman (well below the replacement level of 2.1) by 2022 and possibly as low as .7 by the following year, according to Ukraine’s Institute of Demography and Social Studies.

As bne IntelliNews reported, Emerging Europe is already suffering from a demographic crisis that will take population levels back to the early 20th century in the coming decade. Germany has a fertility rate of 1.6 in 2023. Ukraine’s population fell behind that of Poland for the first time as an electronic census revealed the number of citizens had dropped by some 5mn people to 37.289mn in 2020 since the last census in 2000. By contrast, a UN study found the populations in Central Asia are booming and are all expected to grow in the next few decades.

Thanks to the relative prosperity that Russians enjoyed following the end of the recession in the middle of this decade, plus a pro-birth government policies, Russian fertility rates recovered to 1.8 in 2023 – one of the highest in Europe – from record lows in the middle of the decade when the fertility rate fell to a record low 1.5.

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