In 2023, the monthly birth rate in the war-torn nation of Ukraine has plummeted to 16,000 births. Before the Russian invasion in February last year, Ukraine was reporting as many as 23,000 births per month, data collected by Ukrainian data agency OpenDataBot showed.
According to OpenDataBot, birth rates in Ukraine have been declining for quite some time, at approximately seven per cent since 2015. However, after the Russian invasion which prompted a full-scale war and mass refugee exodus in the country, the numbers have worsened significantly. The nation's birthrate has fallen by twenty-eight per cent since the start of the war. 38,324 fewer babies were born in the country in the first six months of this year compared with 2021, the year before Russian troops crossed over into Eastern Ukraine and triggered all hostilities. This drop from 2021 to 2023 is the steepest since Ukraine gained independence in 1991 and is followed by the next steepest drop in 2015 after Russia annexed Crimea.
“Ukraine had one of the lowest birthrates on the planet. And then a war broke out,” Brienna Perelli-Harris, a professor of demography at the University of Southampton who studies fertility rates in Ukraine, told National Public Radio (NPR) in March this year. To underscore this, even before the war, Ukraine's population was expected to decline by up to fifty per cent by the year 2050, according to the United Nations. The war just made it much, much worse.
Weary soldiers, unreliable munitions, and a determined foe are the frontline challenges of the war-torn nation. At a larger societal level, Ukraine is staring at far worse consequences than the bloodbath on the frontline.
Every major conflict sends people fleeing. But Ukraine’s has been different. The conflict in Ukraine has split apart millions of families and thus does not present a positive picture for its population, even post-war.
One of President Volodymyr Zelensky's first steps, alongside exchanging his suits for military fatigues was to pass a decree that prohibited men aged 18 to 60 from leaving the country. With his back to the wall, as he was faced with the prospect of complete annexation at the hands of world power, his intent was obvious. He needed to preserve a fighting force inside the country. The Ukrainian defence has been spirited and resolute since, but this decree has had far-reaching socio-political and familial consequences.
As refugees fled the country, the decree created a one-sided exodus. Ninety per cent of the eight million Ukrainian refugees who have left since the war began have been women and children. Not just the mere fact the couples were now split up, and likely to not be re-united, for many of these refugees, returning home was not in their plans, spelling out a doomsday scenario for the nation's future.
Anna Trofymenko, a Ukrainian psychotherapist in Kremenchuk spoke to the New York Times of a “divorce epidemic", going on to elaborate on how it may be one of the war’s most far-reaching social consequences, potentially shaping dating patterns, family structure, the way a whole generation of Ukrainian children will be raised and the trajectory of the country’s population for years to come.
While the declining birth rate is the first and clearest indicator of the gloomy outlook for Zelensky as he struggles with many other challenges, it is not the only one. Data also showed that the number of marriages ending in Ukraine over the same time period was two or three times higher than before the war.
Ukraine's divorce rate has always been high, even before the war. However, experts note that it is now so much war-related stress that is driving it but rather the enormous scale of separation. The separation, alongside the continuing uncertainty about whether couples will be able to meet again, or live again together, as well as the one-sided casualties are well-reflected in the drastic decline in birth rate. All together, the numbers spell out a major future problem for the beleaguered nation, even if it is able to weather the war successfully, it will have a family reckoning to deal with.
