What is Ukraine's demography and ethnic composition?
The most recent population census, conducted in Ukraine in 2001, registered 48.4 million people, a notable decrease from the 51.5 million in 1989. Such a population decline reflects the general European trend of decreasing fertility rates, but it has been aggravated in Ukraine's case by the post-Soviet economic collapse and the lack of significant in-migration.
In addition to the number of deaths consistently exceeding the number of births since the early 1990s, there has been considerable immigration from Ukraine to more economically developed countries during the same period. As a result, official estimates put the population totals for 2014 at 45.4 million, and the prognosis, even before the Donbas war and the related population dislocation, pointed to a continuing decline.Throughout the post-communist period, the industrial regions of eastern and southern Ukraine registered the steepest population decline. At the same time, large urban centers and Kyiv in particular (current population estimate: 3.1 million) continue to grow at the expense of the countryside. After reaching a low point in 2001, when Ukraine produced the lowest fertility rate ever recorded in a modern European state (1.078 child per woman), the successive governments improved the trend somewhat with child payments and other pro-natalist measures.1 Average life expectancy in Ukraine has also been increasing recently, although at 66 years for men and 76 for women, it still remains far below that of Western Europe.
According to the 2001 census, the population of Ukraine is composed of 77.8 percent ethnic Ukrainians and 17.3 percent Russians. Other ethnic groups are comparatively negligible, constituting less than one percent, but they can be quite visible in certain regions if settled compactly, as are Moldovans or Romanians (0.8 percent) and Hungarians (0.3 percent) in the southwest; Belarusians (0.6 percent) in the northwest; Bulgarians (0.4 percent) and Greeks (0.2 percent) in the south; and Crimean Tatars (0.5 percent) in the Crimea.
Historically, Jews and Poles constituted significant minority groups in the Ukrainian lands, but the two world wars, the Holocaust, and forced population resettlements under Stalin reduced their respective proportions among Ukraine's population. Once a prominent presence in the regions west of the Dnipro River, Poles now number only 0.3 percent of the total population (144,000). Already decimated during the war, Ukraine's Jews have been emigrating en masse to Israel and the West since the late 1980s, reducing their share from 2 percent in 1959 to 0.2 percent (104,000) in 2001. Most Germanspeaking Mennonites left southern Ukraine in the 1920s and during World War II.Historically a land of ethnic diversity, Ukraine has become a more homogenous East Slavic country since the late Soviet period, with a significant Russian minority and de facto Russian- Ukrainian bilingualism. Ethnic Russians in the Ukrainian SSR did not see themselves as a minority but, rather, as representatives of the Soviet Union's leading nation. After the emergence of independent Ukraine, such an ethnic landscape set the stage for the present conflict.