UN: Ukraine’s population drops by 8 million

According to a report on the Singapore Lianhe Zaobao website on October 22, the United Nations said on the 22nd that since the Russian-Ukrainian conflict in February 2022, Ukraine’s population has decreased by about 8 million, with population outflow and a plummeting birth rate.

According to AFP, the United Nations Population Fund said that although no census has been conducted, the population in war-torn Ukraine has obviously dropped sharply.

“Since the start of the war in 2022, Ukraine’s population has decreased by more than 8 million people,” Bauer, director of the United Nations Population Fund’s Eastern Europe and Central Asia region, told reporters.

She stressed that the population decline has been going on since the outbreak of the Russian-Ukrainian conflict, which is caused by a variety of factors.

Bauer said that Ukraine had one of the lowest birth rates in Europe long before the conflict broke out. Like many countries in Eastern Europe, Ukraine’s population is also declining as young people leave Ukraine in search of more opportunities.

But she said that since the outbreak of the conflict, about 6.7 million people have fled the country, and the total fertility rate has dropped to about one child per woman.

“This is one of the lowest fertility rates in the world, and it’s exacerbated by the tens of thousands of casualties caused by the war.”