Ukraine’s Quiet Depopulation Crisis

Ukraine’s experience also spotlights the fact that, try as they might, governments can do little to arrest emigration and depopulation, whether through populist right-wing programs to incentivize having babies or via financial handouts for returning émigrés. And while many Western countries, including the United States, have focused on the supposed perils or promise of greater immigration, others, such as Ukraine, illustrate the significant cost of a falling population, from the shallow labor force to the nearly abandoned towns that dot the landscape.

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Chernihiv offers an example. A picturesque city once surrounded by farmland and dozens of villages, it has suffered hugely from emigration. Kyiv lies just 90 miles away, close enough to draw young people seeking higher wages (many of whom go on to leave the country entirely), and the local agricultural sector has consolidated into larger holdings that depend less on manual labor thanks to greater scale and technological advances. These trends have been ongoing for decades, but their consequences are becoming clearer. According to Zhanna Deriy, a demographics professor at Chernihiv National University of Technology, some 29 villages in the Chernihiv region have been struck from administrative lists—their populations died out or left, so, in effect, these places no longer exist. “We’re losing our youth,” she told me. “That’s the reality here.”

Why young Ukrainians leave places like this is no mystery. The country is Europe’s second-poorest, beset by corruption and low living standards, and it shares a border with the European Union. Furthermore, a war with Russia-backed separatists still wages in the east, and has displaced 2 million people, many internally. (Ukraine’s depopulation problem is also tied to high mortality rates: According to Ella Libanova, the director of the Ptoukha Institute for Demography and Social Studies at the National Academy of Sciences, 30 percent of 20-year-old Ukrainian men won’t make it to their 60th birthday, thanks in large part to alcohol abuse and road accidents.)

So Ukraine’s limited ability to stem emigration is not entirely an issue of political will. Rather, it is a consequence of the country’s place in the global economy: as a reservoir of migrant labor. In 2018, the most recent year for which data is available, the majority of first-time EU residence permits were given to Ukrainians, the lion’s share of whom moved to neighboring Poland. Remittances from overseas made up more than 11 percent of Ukraine’s GDP. That Ukrainians are heading to Poland and elsewhere in Central Europe also highlights the absurdity of these countries’ negative rhetoric toward prospective immigrants: “One of the paradoxes of [Central European] anti-migrant rhetoric toward the south … is that it’s only possible because those countries have benefited heavily from migration from the east,” Alexander Clarkson, a European-studies lecturer at King’s College London, told me.

Another part of the problem for Kyiv is that it has antiquated and unreliable statistics, making it harder to formulate policies to address the significant outbound flow of citizens. Ukraine’s population stands at a little more than 48 million—or at least it did in 2001, when the most recent census was taken. An array of political crises, conflicts, and more urgent issues have meant that, time and again, successive Ukrainian governments have kicked the can down the road when talk has turned to carrying out a full count of the number of people in the country. (This is by no means unusual: A census can be hugely political, and governments are not always keen to learn about changing population figures, or the shifting balance among different groups.) As a result, few Ukrainians believe the official tally. Libanova, for example, reckons that the total is as low as 35 million (the World Bank estimates the number to be 44.6 million, while the European Commission puts it at 42.2 million). Zelensky campaigned on a pledge to finally conduct the census, which will happen this year.