The latest UN median forecast for Ukraine's population by 2100 is for it to more than halve from its pre-war level of 45mn to to a mere 15.3mn, according to UN's 2024 Revision of World Population Prospects.

According to the UN there were about 37mn people in Ukraine at the beginning of this year, but by 2100, the country's population will be reduced to 15.3mn people.

The UN also predicts that the global peak in populations will come early, in 2084 of namely 10.3bn people, but by 2100, the number of people will decrease slightly to 10.2bn.

“The popular TV ad of the early 90s "We are 52mn" used to be part of the identity of Ukrainians of my generation. Now even the most optimistic scenarios predict twice as few. "Towards the abyss" visualised,” Volodymyr Ishchenko, a research associate at the Institute of East European Studies at the Freie Universität Berlin.

Ukraine was already in trouble before the fighting started. The pre-war 45mn headcount was already controversial as Ukraine has not held a formal census since 2000. As the poorest country in Europe, a fifth of the labour force had already left to seek better paid jobs in the EU and Russia. On top of that the fertility rate in 2022 was 1.4 births per woman -- well below the replacement rate.

An earlier study by the UN 2022 said that Ukraine will never fully regain the population lost to death and mass displacement since Russia’s invasion in 2022. The UN Population Prospects projections indicate that while the country’s population will recover to some extent from 2023 onwards – assuming the war ends within months – it will never again reach the 43.3mn seen at the beginning of 2022.

Even the UN 37mn estimate of the current population is controversial with other estimates putting it at least ten million fewer people. Ukraine’s population fell behind that of Poland for the first time after a cut price electronic census revealed the number of citizens had dropped by some 5mn people to 37.289mn in 2020 since the last census in 2000. Eurostat also estimated the actual population size to be 37.98mn in 20218 and another study in 2023 found the population had fallen again to 29mn souls, sparking concerns over the future of the country’s demographic future, according to a study from the Ukrainian Institute of the Future, Ukraine Business News reported.

And the crisis is accelerating. Ukraine's birth rate plummeted to 300-year low with just 187,000 births recorded in 2023 (including in Russian-occupied territories), according to according to Ukraine’s Institute of Demography and Social Studies -- the lowest annual figure in recorded history over the last 300 years, exacerbating an already dire population catastrophe facilitated by economic turmoil and war.

The demographic curve shows that Ukraine’s population has been in an uninterrupted decline since 1991, and took an even sharper downward step in 2014 following the 2014 Revolution of Dignity.

Ukraine’s demographic crisis is being catalysed by the war with Russia, but as bne IntelliNews reported, it is part of a wider demographic crisis in Emerging Europe that will take population levels back to the early 20^th century in the coming decade. By contrast, a UN study found the populations in Central Asia are booming and are all expected to grow in the next few decades.

Russia's is also famously facing a population shrinkage, but thanks to the relative prosperity in the noughties plus a pro-birth government policies as featured by bne IntelliNews’ Putin’s babies, Russian fertility rates recovered to 1.8 in 2023 – one of the highest in Europe – from record lows in the middle of the decade when the fertility rate fell to a record low 1.5. However, since then fertility rates have recovered a bit further thanks to Russian President Vladimir Putin’s ongoing focus on stemming the population decline and fertility rates were 1.826 births per woman as of 2021 – one of the highest rates in Europe. According to United Nations statistics, the fertility of Russia's Muslims stands at 2.3, much higher than the overall national fertility rate.