The 2022 Russian invasion of Ukraine has accelerated demographic decline and will negatively affect the structure and dynamics of the Ukrainian population "for many decades", with a decline of between 21% and 31% by 2052, a study indicates today.
The data is contained in the new edition of the "European Demographic Data Sheet", published every two years, says the Vienna International Institute of Applied Systems (IIASA), in a statement released today.
"The war in Ukraine probably triggered the largest migration flow in Europe since the expulsion of Germans from many countries after the Second World War," explained Tomás Sobotka, an expert at the Institute of Demography at the Austrian Academy of Sciences and one of the authors of the study, in note.
By mid-2023, 5.9 million people had fled Ukraine and another 5.1 million were internally displaced, according to the study.
Since independence in 1991, Ukraine has seen a demographic decline attributed to low birth rates and relatively high death and emigration rates, a development that the war "accelerated dramatically," Sobotka noted.
In this sense, the country's population structure and dynamics will be "negatively influenced for many decades", he added.
In the best-case scenario of the analysis, which predicts a rapid recovery for Ukraine with more immigration than emigration, Ukraine's population decreases by 21%, from 43.3 million at the beginning of 2022 to 34.3 million in 2052.
In the most pessimistic scenario, with a prolonged war and little return of emigrants, the population would decrease by 31%, to 29.9 million in 2052.
In the "European Demographic Factsheet", a team of researchers from the Institute of Demography of the Austrian Academy of Sciences (OAW) and the Wittgenstein Center Vienna, in cooperation with the University of Vienna and IIASA, studied and visualized demographic trends in 45 countries Europeans.
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