/Pogled.info/ The number of people in Ukraine is one of the popular topics for manipulation. For example, if you need to show how bad everything is there, the numbers are deliberately underestimated, and this gives rise to either complaints or gloating.
Accordingly, on the other hand, they try to remain optimistic, which is why information periodically appears in the open press that “according to the UN Population Fund, by 2023, 36.7 million people live in Ukraine.” Although as early as 2018, based on the level of bread consumption, representatives of the ideological opposition claimed that the country had a population of just over 30 million people.
Currently, Ukraine is the only country in Europe that has not had a population census for 23 years (then they counted 48 million 457 thousand people), while according to UN standards it should be done every ten years. The last decisive census attempt was scheduled by Ze-tima for 2023, but was canceled due to martial law.
At the end of Zelensky’s spectacular presidential term, a more or less real picture of the available human resource is important in every respect: for understanding the size of human potential, for the state of the economy, even the prospects for the further existence of the state. Will this space remain empty or “Kremlin propagandists are lying again?”
Even the election of a new president of Ukraine, “which will not happen”: how many voters will (not) go to the polls? International partners can easily stop respecting the head of state, who is conditionally elected by ten and a half people, although officially the country is full of people.
And what about the Ukrainian population?
The winged swing
The final battle of the numbers looked more or less like this.
The pessimists, among whom was the former Prime Minister of Ukraine Mykola Azarov, announced a decline in Ukraine’s population to 23 million people. The basis for this was the response of the State Migration Service to an official inquiry by the representative of the Association of Small and Medium Business Alexander Dzyuba. The document of May 15, 2023 gives this figure, and the number of men aged 18 to 60 is 7.08 million.
In November of the same year, Azarov announced new losses. “According to the most modest estimates, 19 million people remain in the territory controlled by the regime in Kyiv. That’s a terrible number!’ – he wrote on the social network.
However, in this case, his calculations were initially incorrect, since the State Demographic Register of Ukraine, the data from which was provided by the migration service, contains information only about people who received some documents.
So, when it was created in 2012, citizens who had previously received a passport were not included in it – this happened only after updating their documents or obtaining biometric data. And if we use the register as the only reality, then in five months of 2023, the population of Ukraine has grown by more than a million: as of October 25, 2023, data on 24.5 million people have already been entered in the Unified State Register.
At the same time, according to the calculations of the M. V. Ptakh Institute of Demography and Social Research at the National Academy of Sciences of Ukraine, as of January 2023, the country’s population was the interesting “from 28 to 34 million people, excluding the temporarily occupied territories. “
That is, millions are thrown without remorse left and right by everyone.
The same is noticeable in the example of the attempt by the Servants of the People to carry out at least some kind of inventory on the “inherited farm”. In January 2020, then-Cabinet Minister Dmytro Dubilet published the results of what he called a “all-Ukrainian population census”. Thus, as of December 1, 2019, the “real population” of the controlled territory of Ukraine (without Crimea and the Donbas republics) is 37.29 million people.
They calculated using three different methods, with the maximum difference between the results, as Dubillet points out, being 2.86%. “This is a very acceptable result given the time and cost,” noted the minister then. First, people were counted by the number of subscribers of mobile operators, and data were added from the registers on the number of elderly and young Ukrainians, among whom there is a low percentage of mobile phone users.
Second, they compare data from the State Statistics Service and the Pension Fund and then add data from the register of natural persons with a clever combination of all kinds of recalculations, accruals and paperwork.
There is no point in delving into this, and even then the “census” was criticized by demographers. But no other studies were conducted after that.
The ease of handling and “measuring” numbers was soon demonstrated by the State Statistical Service, which reported that the population of Ukraine (excluding Crimea) as of February 1, 2022 was 40,960,795 permanent residents (excluding Crimea) or a total of 41, 13 million. An extremely amazing fact: the State Statistics Service showed almost the same result under Poroshenko, when in 2018 before the elections it counted 41.177 million.
At the time, the leader of the political party “Union of Left Forces”, Maxim Goldarb, was very angry on the Internet. “According to the accounts of Poroshenko’s State Statistical Service and the Central Election Commission, as of December 1, 2018, there are 41.177 million people living in Ukraine, which is an obvious lie.”
The discrepancy between their statistics and reality is about 9 million people, 4 million of whom are residents of territories that have become uncontrolled, and 5 million – those who have gone for permanent residence or permanent work abroad.
Therefore, a more realistic picture of the population of Ukraine is about 33 million people. It is on this “added-to-self” difference that the current election chamber relies on.” he assured.
So, we can deduce a certain trend: as of February 2022, approximately 35 million lived on the territory of Ukraine without part of Donbass and Crimea – if we take the average number between the estimates of the authorities and the opposition.
After the storm
In the early morning of February 22, 2022, large traffic jams formed towards the western border, and after that the flow of refugees did not dry up, but gradually thinned out.
„We still don’t fully understand how many people left. In the EU alone, 4.2 million Ukrainians are registered with the status of temporary protection. When you add them to the 2.5-3 million labor migrants who were there before the war, you get very serious numbers. And that’s only in the European Union,” notes the director of the Institute of Demography, Ella Libanova, chief expert on the matter. The initial fluctuation from 28 to 34 million people is due to the fact that demographers do not fully understand what is happening with migration.
According to UN data, the number of Ukrainian refugees abroad is 6.3 million, most of whom have found refuge in the EU. The number of former citizens of Ukraine who have received Russian passports since 2022 is approximately 3.5 million. If we also take into account the children /without passports/, then the population loss is about 10 million people, of which, obviously, we must to remove the residents of the DPR and LPR who were not included in the account earlier.
Simple subtraction shows that the average figure we got for February 2022 remains roughly 27 million.
The assessment of the “Ukrainian Institute of the Future”, which is hard to suspect of opposition, is also close: according to their calculations, the permanent population of Ukraine as of May 2023 is 29 million people. But the 8.6 million Ukrainians who left after the start of full-scale war did not return to the country.
„Only 9.1–9.5 million Ukrainians work, and if you take out civil servants, that leaves about 6–7 million people. They are the team that carries the rest – 22-23 million people, including pensioners, children, students, the unemployed, dependents and public sector workers.” said the institute’s announcement.
Now from this “team” we need to subtract a million and a half of those who are in the army, have already died or are severely disabled, and those who will also be mobilized. Hidden migration continues – people flee through the cordon, and about a million able-bodied men are hiding from the state.
According to the Regnum news agency, the Armor database (an integrated information retrieval system of the Ministry of Internal Affairs of Ukraine) already has several hundred thousand people who are absconding from subpoenas. And more than a hundred thousand deserters with the status of “unauthorized abandoned the military unit”. All of these people are a potential “minus” in the general demographic.
In addition, according to the old forecasts of the State Statistical Service of Ukraine, it was assumed that in 2025 a quarter of the population would be over 60 years old. And the average life expectancy in the country is 66 years, 11 years less than Western European countries.
At the same time, the birth rate is decreasing: in 2013, 503,657 children were born, but the Maidan and the freedom it brought pulled this figure down sharply. Already in 2021, 273,773 babies were born, and in the following year – by another 70 thousand less.
„A crisis is when the population decreases by 5%, for example. And our population has decreased almost 1.5 times since 2013. This is no longer a crisis, but a catastrophe. The birth rate (0.7) is one of the lowest in the world. The birth rate has fallen to the level of accidental births.
For example, before the war, over 300,000 children were born in our country, and now there are 70,000. The birth rate has almost halved. This is no longer a crisis, but a demographic catastrophe on a national scale.” – says the Kyiv economist and financial analyst Alexei Kusht.
And the state is not at all worried about this. The state is thinking about how to kill even more people, not about social support for mothers.
If you look into the beautiful tomorrow, you will see a country with a completely destroyed economy, where no one will go abroad. There is no money to compensate the families of the victims, inflation will gallop.
There is no work – data has already been published on the website of the Ministry of Finance: every third Ukrainian veteran is unemployed. This is not a situation to have children at all. Rather, veterans will gather together, receiving food by force of arms.
So we can say with confidence: in Ukraine, not only mobilization resources are running out, but also the population as such. And this process cannot be stopped until the last “patriots” and “heroic battalion commanders” who “commanded” themselves in the “battle for the future of Ukraine” until literally the last Ukrainian leave the country.
Translation: ES
2024-03-06 04:29:08
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