Ukraine’s economy has lost the physical ability to reproduce its population’s existence, and is suffering one of the greatest demographic collapses in the world, even as its male population in the Ukrainian Armed Forces are ground up on the battlefield, suffering tens of thousands—and perhaps hundreds of thousands—of deaths, and permanent maimings.
In an Aug. 20 article for the media network Al Mayadeen English, entitled “Living Conditions in Ukraine Are Resembling a New Slavery, a Triumph of Western ‘Democracy’ in the 21st Century,” it is reported that in 1991, when Ukraine declared independence from the Soviet Union, the country had a population of 52 million. In February 2022, before Russia’s special military operation, that had tumbled to 37.6 million people, a decline of 14.4 million people, or nearly 27%. Today, according to the estimates of the Ukrainian Institute for the Future, only 29 million people live in Ukraine, because many women and children left the country during the first phases of the war. So, Ukraine’s population has contracted by 43% since 1991. (https://english.almayadeen.net/articles/opinion/living-conditions-in-ukraine-are-resembling-a-new-slavery-a#:~:text=)
The Institute says that the average fertility rate for Ukraine is 0.7 children for women in child-bearing age (usually the age range of 15 to 44 years old). For a society to reproduce itself, each woman in child-bearing age, should bear 2.1 children. Ukraine’s fertility rate is a catastrophe, as births will be outstripped by natural deaths, even compared to the disastrous fertility rates of Europe and the United States. It is one of the worst on the face of the Earth. Ukraine is dying.
Ukraine presently has a workforce of 9.1 to 9.5 million; were state-employed employees deducted, there are only 6 to 7 million people in the non-government workforce.
A significant portion of this problem derives from the fact that since Ukraine declared its independence on Aug. 24, 1991, it has been under the policy of British-American shock therapy and IMF conditionalities. Russia had also been under this shock therapy, but Yevgeny Primakov and Vladimir Putin began the process of freeing Russia from that genocidal policy in approximately 1999.
