The Ukrainian trains coming from the borders with the European Union are full this December with mothers returning to their country for a few days. They and their children return to spend the Christmas holidays and the New Year with their families. It won’t take long for them to take the road 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 stated last Thursday in Kiev, where she She is visiting her parents and husband. This 35-year-old woman lives in Malgrat de Mar (Catalonia) and works at the reception of a hotel. Her 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 with which I can grow,” says Soroka, “to live well in Ukraine you need a lot of money because prices are sky-high and salaries are bad. Do you know what monthly pension my mother receives? The equivalent of 30 euros.” Her husband cannot leave Ukraine because martial law applies to all adult men up to the age of 65—with exceptions, such as fathers of more than three children. Soroka does not believe that her husband wants to live in Spain in the future, but she does not care: she arrived in Catalonia in March 2022, a few days after the Russian invasion began, and for her it was an opportunity to start a better life. .
There are 6.3 million refugees who, like Soroka, left Ukraine during the war and have not returned, according to the UN Refugee Agency (UNHCR) ―Other estimates raise the figure to 8 million―. More than half are women, and a third are minors. The number of those who have returned is 1.1 million people, according to estimates by the International Organization for Migration (IOM). 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 likely not to return.
“My dream would be for 50% to return, and if it were 60%, I would be the happiest person in Ukraine,” Ella Libanova, director of the Institute of Demography and Social Studies of Ukraine (IDSS), the national institution, said last November. academic reference on the subject. Libanova spoke these words at the 7th Congress of Ukrainian Women. A few days earlier, on Ukraine’s main television news, Libanova was extremely pessimistic: “The situation will be very bad, much worse than anyone can imagine.” The director of the IDSS revealed the population forecasts for the country in 2033: a range of between 26 and 35 million inhabitants, including the territories annexed by weapons by Russia. If the average of the range is about 30 million, this represents 42% less population than what Ukraine had in the year of its independence, in 1991, when there were 52 million.
The IDSS also provides current data and according to the territory. When the Russian invasion began, Ukraine had 44 million inhabitants. In 2023 there are 36 million, including the territories occupied by Russia. If the data is limited to the provinces of free Ukraine, the figure falls to 32 million, 38% less than the 1991 population.
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Ukraine was already a country of high migration, like the rest of those that left the communist bloc after the disintegration 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 last July published by the Vienna Institute for Humanity Studies. International Economy (WIIW). Tvedorstup cited five problems that have been aggravated by the war: the drop in the birth rate; the fall in life expectancy; more migration, aging of the population and destruction of the labor market.
“Disastrous for reconstruction”
The average life expectancy of men has gone from 66.4 years before the war to 57.3 in 2023, according to the IDSS; In women, life expectancy fell from 76.4 to 70.9 years. It is not only about the tens of thousands of soldiers and civilians killed or injured, it is also “a worsening with the invasion of the mental and physical state of Ukrainians,” the Center for European Studies (OSW) highlighted in a July report. Based in Warsaw, this center warns that for Ukraine, “the prospect is of a demographic catastrophe” due to “the negative tendency for future generations to procreate, in addition to economic uncertainty.” Tvedorstup noted that Ukraine faces “a large drop in birth rates” because the migration of women during the war will have a “long-term impact”: “The more infrastructure that is destroyed during the war, the more likely it is that refugees will remain permanent abroad, 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 fertility rate in Europe before the war, according to a 2023 report by the Joint Research Center (JRC), a body of the European Commission: “Such low fertility is explained by the prevalence in families of having only one child after independence, a result of economic uncertainty, poor expectations, the lack of social services and family policies, and standards “gender conservative.” The birth rate has fallen dramatically during the war, according to the IDSS: in 2022 it was 0.9 children per woman and in 2023 they expect it to be reduced to 0.7. The EU average, according to statistics from the European Commission, 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 gender imbalance also weighs: if in 2022 there were 86 men in Ukraine for every 100 women, in 2023, according to the IDSS, there will be 110 men for every 100 women. The EU average is 100 men for every 104 women. In a study published last summer by the Wilson Center in the United States, Libanova warned that after the war, if the Ukrainian economy does not recover quickly, the exodus will be greater: “Families will want to be reunited abroad, this means that Ukraine could lose between one million and one and a half million young people [hombres] with training.”
“It is important to emphasize,” Libanova continued, “that migration Ukraine is losing young people, of reproductive age, educated and eager to prosper.” They are people like Anna Temochko, who has lived in Barcelona with her two children since the beginning of the invasion. She is a computer scientist and works remotely for a Ukrainian company. She does not rule out returning to her hometown of Lviv, one of the safest regions in Ukraine, in the future. It is also one of the most saturated with displaced people from the Eastern provinces, where the fighting is taking place, an internal diaspora that causes, for example, an increase in housing prices. “Prices in Lviv are not much lower than in Spain, but with clearly lower salaries,” says this 35-year-old woman. Temochko believes that there are three factors that tip the balance in favor of a person like her settling abroad: if she achieves economic stability, if she creates a new family and if the children adapt well to the host society. She also admits to having a certain “sense of injustice”: “Injustice of being in Barcelona, in such a pleasant city, while there are people more patriotic than me in Ukraine.”
Temochko will travel to Lviv to spend Christmas. His last visit was in August, during his children’s school holidays. That summer he understood another reason why he did not plan to return: “If the economic situation worsens, societies become depressed. When I was there, I had the feeling of being in a tired and anxiety-ridden society. “I don’t know if I want my children to grow up in an environment like that.” As the war drags on, discouragement grows among the Ukrainian population. And the more months the conflict lasts, Libanova noted in her work for the Wilson Center, the more difficult it will be for the women who left to return.
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