The Russian-Ukrainian War: the Possibility of Assessment of Demographic Losses

Abstract

Determining demographic losses in wars is an important and complicated problem for demographers and statisticians and a vital one for the society. To have the result produced, specialists need to assess not only immediate direct death toll among military and civilians due to warfare, but the war-entailed migration of the population beyond the country borders and the decreased birth rate.   

Regrettably, the full-scale Russian invasion in the Ukrainian territory has already demonstrated an incredibly high death toll. Because the official statistics provided by the State Statistics Service of Ukraine has abstained, since the beginning of 2022, from publishing estimates pertaining to natural and mechanic movement of the population due to security considerations in time of war, researchers have to use information from various analytical websites, produced on the basis of available sources.    

Another challenge is the prolonged absence of a population census that was performed in independent Ukraine only once, in 2001. Hence, prior to the full-scale invasion the information on the population number (together with the temporarily occupied Crimea and the territories in the East) was based on estimated data.  

The article presents an attempt to analyze, on the basis of available information, the relative death toll due to the Russian-Ukrainian war over nine years, and to compare it with the analogous data for selected Balkan countries in the wars of late 20th – early 21st centuries. It is demonstrated that the annual relative death toll due to warfare (per 100,000 population) in Ukraine in 2022, although estimated by the available incomplete data, exceed all the analogous figures for Balkan countries. 

The article’s objective is to explore a feasibility of assessing demographic losses, relative death toll in particular, in time of the Russian-Ukrainian war and Balkan wars.

The analysis led to the conclusion that the demographic losses in Ukraine could not be feasibly assessed not only due to missing data on excess casualties caused by the war, but also due to the unknown number of temporary migrants (war refugees) and impossibility to estimate the number of children probably unborn due to the war.