This December, Ukrainian trains coming from the European Union borders are full of mothers returning to their country for a few days. They and their children return to spend the Christmas holidays and New Year with their families. It won't be long before they head abroad again. “Of my Ukrainian acquaintances in Spain, we have a group in which there are about 25 of us who met in the reception programs, all with children, none of them want to live in Ukraine, zero,” Alona Soroka explained last Thursday in Kiev, where she visits her parents and husband. The 35-year-old woman lives in Malgrat de Mar (Catalonia) and works at the reception of a hotel. His goal is to stay in Spain forever.
“There I have security, quality of life, good education for my two daughters [de 4 y 10 años] and a job where I can grow,” says Soroka, “to live well in Ukraine, you need a lot of money, because the prices are sky-high and the salaries are poor.” Do you know what monthly pension my mother receives? The equivalent of 30 euros.” Her husband cannot leave Ukraine because martial law mobilizes all adult men up to the age of 65 – with exceptions, such as fathers of more than three children. Soroka doesn't think her husband wants to live in Spain in the future, but she doesn't care: she arrived in Catalonia in March 2022, a few days after the start of the Russian invasion, and for her it was an opportunity to have a better life start life. .
According to the UN Refugee Agency (UNHCR), there are 6.3 million refugees who, like Soroka, left Ukraine during the war and have not returned – other estimates put the number at 8 million. More than half are women and a third are minors. According to estimates by the International Organization for Migration (IOM), the number of returnees is 1.1 million people. According to a UNHCR survey last July, 18% of those displaced abroad wanted to return to Ukraine in the next three months and 62% when the necessary security and stability conditions are met; the remaining 20% were unlikely to return.
“My dream would be for 50% to come back, and if it was 60%, I would be the happiest person in Ukraine,” Ella Libanova, director of the Institute of Demographics and Social Studies of Ukraine (IDSS), the national institution, said last November. Scientific reference on this topic. Libanova spoke these words at the 7th Congress of Ukrainian Women. A few days earlier, Libanova appeared extremely pessimistic on the main Ukrainian television news: “The situation will be very bad, much worse than anyone can imagine.” The director of the IDSS announced the population forecasts for the country in 2033: a range between 26 and 35 million inhabitants, including the territories annexed by Russia by arms. If the average of this range is about 30 million, this means 42% less population than Ukraine in its year of independence in 1991, when there were 52 million.
The IDSS also provides current data and depending on the area. When the Russian invasion began, Ukraine had a population of 44 million. In 2023 there will be 36 million, including the territories occupied by Russia. If the data is limited to the provinces of free Ukraine, the number drops to 32 million, 38% less than the 1991 population.
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Ukraine was already a high-migration country, like the rest of the countries that left the communist bloc after the collapse of the Soviet Union. But if other Eastern European countries managed to reverse the situation thanks to political and economic stability, Ukraine has only gotten worse, as researcher Marina Tvedorstup explained in a report published last July by the Vienna Institute for the Humanities. International Economics (WIIW). Tvedorstup identified five problems that were exacerbated by the war: the decline in the birth rate; the decline in life expectancy; more migration, aging of the population and destruction of the labor market.
“Disastrous for reconstruction”
According to IDSS, the average life expectancy of men has increased from 66.4 years before the war to 57.3 years in 2023; For women, life expectancy fell from 76.4 to 70.9 years. This is not just about the tens of thousands of soldiers and civilians killed or injured, but also about “a deterioration in the mental and physical condition of Ukrainians as a result of the invasion,” emphasized the Center for European Studies (OSW) in a July report. This Warsaw-based center warns that Ukraine “faces the prospect of a demographic catastrophe” due to “the negative propensity of future generations to reproduce as well as economic insecurity.” Tvedorstup pointed out that Ukraine faces “a sharp decline in birth rates” because the migration of women during the war will have “long-term effects”: “The more infrastructure is destroyed during the war, the more likely it is “Refugees come to stay abroad permanently, which would be disastrous for reconstruction.”
With an average of 1.2 births per woman, Ukraine was already one of the countries with the lowest birth rates in Europe before the war, according to a 2023 report by the Joint Research Center (JRC), a body of the European Commission: “So Low fertility can be explained by the fact that families often have only one child after independence, due to economic insecurity, poor expectations, lack of social services and family policies, and “gender conservative” standards. According to IDSS, the birth rate fell dramatically during the war: in 2022 it was 0.9 children per woman and in 2023 it is expected to fall to 0.7. According to statistics from the European Commission, the EU average is 1.5.
It is not only the lack of social and economic stability that is slowing down the birth rate in Ukraine, the demographic imbalance between the genders is also important: If there were 86 men for every 100 women in Ukraine in 2022, there would be 86 men in Ukraine in 2023, according to IDSS . There are 110 men for every 100 women. On average in the EU there are 100 men for every 104 women. In a study published last summer by the Wilson Center in the United States, Libanova warned that post-war emigration will be greater if the Ukrainian economy does not recover quickly: “Families will want to be reunited abroad, that is, in Ukraine .” could lose between one and one and a half million young people [hombres] with training.”
“It is important to emphasize,” Libanova continued, “that through migration, Ukraine is losing young people of childbearing age who are educated and anxious for prosperity.” These are people like Anna Temochko, who have been with her two children since the beginning of the invasion lives in Barcelona. She is a computer scientist and works remotely for a Ukrainian company. He does not rule out a future return to his hometown of Lviv, one of the safest regions in Ukraine. It is also one of the most saturated internal diaspora with displaced people from the eastern provinces where the fighting is taking place, leading to, for example, a rise in property prices. “The prices in Lviv are not much lower than in Spain, but the salaries are significantly lower,” says the 35-year-old. Temochko believes that there are three factors that determine whether a person like her settles abroad: whether she achieves economic stability, whether she starts a new family and whether the children adapt well to the host society. He also admits to having a certain “feeling of injustice”: “It is unfair to be in Barcelona, in such a pleasant city, while in Ukraine there are people more patriotic than me.”
Temochko will travel to Lviv to spend Christmas. Her last visit was in August, during her children's school holidays. This summer he understood another reason why he did not plan to return: “When the economic situation worsens, societies fall into depression. When I was there, I felt like I was in a tired and anxiety-ridden society. “I don't know if I want my children to grow up in such an environment.” As the war drags on, discouragement among the Ukrainian population grows. And the longer the conflict lasts, Libanova emphasized in her work for the Wilson Center, the more difficult it will be for the women who emigrated to return.
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