October
3, 2023
Via
a Responsible Statecraft piece I came onto a EU study that tried to predict the
future demographics of Ukraine's population.
The
study is from early 2022 and is based on Ukrainian casualty numbers from only
the very first month of the war. Their worst case scenario was this:
Our third and fourth scenarios assume that
the war will continue for a month or longer so that further casualties and
refugees are expected. We assume the following casualties: 5,000 deaths among
soldiers and 1,500 civilian deaths based on the current trends. There will be 5
million refugees, which is an estimate by UNHCR (UNHCR 2022a)
The
real refugee numbers are twice as high and the casualty numbers, wounded and
dead, are of course about 100 times higher than the study assumed. It was thus
not worth the money that had been spend on it.
Still,
some graphs in it are usable.
Yesterday
I shortly discussed the op-ed by the former British Minister of Defense Ben
Wallace in which he asserts:
The average age of the soldiers at the
front is over 40.
He
then urges the Ukrainian government to throw more young men into the meat
grinder.
My
response to Wallace was this:
The young Ukrainians are gone. They either
have fled from Ukraine or are wounded, disabled or died. You can not mobilize
what is no longer there.
Unfortunately
the real situation is worse then I had thought. The EU demographic study included
this graph:
Ukraine’s population by age and sex in 2020
The
'age pyramid' in Ukraine isn't a pyramid. In 2020 there was a huge lack of 15
to 20 years old people. They were simply not there. They never existed. The
number of newborns around 2000 must have been horribly low.
The
reason for that was likely the serious downturn of Ukraine's economy after it
had separated itself from the Soviet Union.
Ukraine’s GDP(PPP)
It
took a decade long severe recession for Ukraine to find a bottom for its
economy. Bad economic times and low expectations of betterment had influenced
the desire of its people to procreate. Two more downturns followed during the
global recession around 2008 and due to the 2014 Maidan coup and the civil war
following it.
Thus
when the war started there were only half as many people of 20 year age than 40
year old ones. It is no wonder then that few of younger age are seen at the
front line.
There
is still one measure Ukraine might take to increase the numbers of young
soldiers. There currently are exemptions from mobilization for those who study
at a university. If Ukraine would draft these if could probably find a few
ten-thousand additional soldiers. But it would also strip itself of its future
elite.
The
already bad demographic prediction some 20 years out would then look even worse
than they currently do.
Early
this year Ukraine's birthrate had hit a new low:
To keep a population steady, research shows
it's necessary to have an average of about 2.1 babies per family — known as a
replacement rate. In Ukraine, fertility rates have remained under that
threshold since 1990. Over the last two decades, the rate has often dropped
below what experts call a "very low" fertility rate of 1.3, when a
population begins to shrink at an ever increasing rate. In January 2021, a year
before Russia's full-scale invasion, the fertility rate was 1.16, according to
national statistics.
The
birthrate has since dropped further and is now the lowest one in the world:
Birthrates in Ukraine have fallen by 28% in the first half of 2023,
compared to the same period prior to the war, marking the most significant drop
since Ukraine gained its independence in 1991, The Wall Street Journal reported
on Sept. 25.
...
Due to the ongoing war, millions of
Ukrainian women with children were forced to leave the country, while men aged
18 to 60 were prohibited from leaving. As a result, many couples were
physically separated, while others delayed starting families, the report says.
In the first half of 2023, there were
96,755 children born in Ukraine. Since 2013, the country's fertility rate has
been dropping by approximately 7% per year.
The
population of Ukraine will shrink further. In 1990 Ukraine had a population of
more than 50 million people. Twenty years from now the country will have less
than maybe 25 million inhabitants. This even if all refugees return. A large if
that this is unlikely to happen.
Support
for Ukraine is shrinking:
As Russia has become more bloodyminded,
Ukraine’s allies seem caught in their own conflicting boundary conditions.
There is no willingness to mobilize to defend Ukraine. There isn’t even a
serious effort to ramp up military production to an adequate level to match,
let alone surpass, Russia’s output.
And that’s before getting to the fact that
Ukraine as a county has become a very costly ward of all its backers.
Yesterday
a meeting of the EU's foreign ministers on further military assistance for
Ukraine ended without results (machine translation):
The foreign ministers of the EU countries
at today's summit in Kiev could not agree on the allocation of military
assistance to Ukraine in the amount of 5 billion euros for 2024.
This was announced at a press conference
following the event by EU High Representative for Foreign Affairs and Security
Policy Josep Borrel.
The
EU's budget for 2023 was €168.6 billion. €5 billion are peanuts but the EU
countries could not unite over it. The senseless generosity has reached the end
of the possible.
Borrel
predicted the inevitable outcome:
Earlier, EU Foreign Policy Chief Josep
Borrel said that the cessation of military support for Kiev from the West will
lead to a quick end to the conflict in Ukraine, but as a result, the country
will lose its independence.
A
quick end to the conflict is what all sane people should hope for.
Look
at the demographics and economics above and ask yourself what 30 years of
'independence' have done for Ukraine.
To
end it could well be the best that could ever happen to it. Unfortunately for
it Russia is unlikely to step in and to subsidize its further existence.
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