POST-WAR DEMOGRAPHIC SECURITY IN UKRAINE: SCENARIOS AND LESSONS FOR AGING EU MEMBER STATES

Ukraine is to enter a post-war phase with demographic dynamics that have shifted from a long-term structural imbalance to a direct security challenge. Even before the full-scale invasion, fertility remained far below the replacement threshold of 2.15 children per woman. Since 2022, depopulation has accelerated through three cumulative channels: direct human losses, mass emigration, and a collapse in births. By 2023–2024, Ukraine recorded approximately 6 live births per 1,000 inhabitants, placing it among the lowest-fertility countries globally, in contrast to high-fertility states such as Niger with more than 46 births per 1,000 [1]. This contrast does not reflect cultural divergence but illustrates the magnitude of demographic shock, which increasingly resembles trends faced by aging EU member states under non-war conditions.

Scenario-based projections indicate that demographic stabilization will not automatically follow the end of hostilities. If the war ends in 2027, Ukraine’s population in 2040 is estimated at around 23.7 million; if hostilities persist until 2030, the figure may decline further to approximately 22.0 million, calculated only for government-controlled territory [2]. These scenarios demonstrate that prolonged conflict produces irreversible demographic losses that cannot be offset by short-term recovery policies.

International baseline projections present a more moderate but highly conditional outlook. The International Monetary Fund estimates a decline from 41 million residents in 2021 to 33.3 million in 2024, with potential stabilization near 34 million by 2027–2030, assuming early peace and partial return migration [3]. Importantly, this projection represents an upper boundary rather than a recovery trajectory, highlighting the narrow policy space within which demographic security can still be influenced.

In this context, demographic security should be understood as the achievement of desired threshold values across a system of indicators, including life expectancy at birth, infant mortality, natural population growth, aging coefficients, dependency ratios, and net migration balances [4]. Failure to reach acceptable ranges across these indicators directly constrains labor supply, fiscal sustainability, and reconstruction capacity. Moreover, preventing avoidable post-war mortality, rehabilitating veterans, supporting 3.7 million internally displaced persons, and designing credible return and repatriation policies are as decisive as pronatalist measures [5]. International experience shows that without sustained intervention, war-driven demographic losses become structurally persistent, offering a critical lesson for aging EU member states.

Demographic security policy operates under conditions of scarcity, uncertainty, and delayed effects. In post-war Ukraine, these constraints are amplified by institutional damage, fiscal limits, and global competition for labor and capital. As a result, demographic policy cannot rely on a single dominant instrument. Instead, it requires comparing strategic scenarios that redistribute demographic risks across different indicators rather than attempting to optimize all of them simultaneously. Each scenario prioritizes certain indicators of demographic security while accepting deterioration or stagnation in others, thereby revealing implicit trade-offs that are often overlooked in public debate.

From a policy-design perspective, scenarios serve as decision frameworks rather than prescriptions. They clarify which demographic indicators can realistically be influenced in the short, medium, or long term, and which risks must be absorbed rather than eliminated. Table 1 systematizes the main demographic security scenarios available to Ukraine, showing how each affects population quantity, quality, structure, and sustainability.

Table 1

Scenarios for achieving demographic security in post-war Ukraine

Source: elaborated by the author

Demographic security in post-war Ukraine cannot be reduced to population growth alone. Instead, it emerges from the interaction between demographic indicators, where improvements in one dimension often generate pressure in another. The mass immigration scenario, for example, directly improves population size and temporarily eases demographic dependency, yet creates systemic risks for social cohesion and institutional capacity. If integration mechanisms fail, initial demographic gains may translate into long-term instability, undermining demographic security rather than strengthening it.

Pronatalist stimulation represents the opposite logic: it prioritizes identity preservation and long-term natural growth while sacrificing short-term effectiveness. The empirical record across developed countries shows that financial incentives do not restore fertility to replacement levels. In demographic security terms, this scenario delays action while allowing deterioration in population size, dependency ratios, and aging coefficients to continue unchecked during the critical reconstruction phase.

Diaspora engagement offers low-risk but also low-impact outcomes. Its strength lies in cultural compatibility and controlled migration balance, yet its weakness is scale. Even optimistic assumptions cannot transform diaspora return into a quantitative solution. Consequently, this scenario functions best as a supportive instrument, improving indicator quality rather than altering indicator values decisively.

The technological substitution scenario departs from demographic correction entirely. By accepting long-term depopulation, it seeks to stabilize economic systems through productivity rather than population. This approach mitigates dependency pressures without improving core demographic indicators. While realistic under sustained low fertility, it risks territorial imbalance, social exclusion, and the erosion of demographic resilience outside technologically advanced regions.

Selective human capital migration occupies a middle ground between quantity and quality. Its demographic contribution is modest in numerical terms but strategically important. By improving life expectancy, fiscal sustainability, and innovation capacity, it indirectly supports multiple indicators. However, its success depends on institutional credibility, security guarantees, and global competitiveness – factors that cannot be rapidly manufactured in a post-war environment.

The hybrid scenario integrates elements from all other approaches and therefore best reflects the logic of demographic security as indicator stabilization, not maximization. By distributing policy effort across mortality reduction, migration management, technological adaptation, and limited fertility support, it reduces systemic vulnerability. Importantly, it aligns demographic policy with realistic constraints, recognizing that some indicators may only stabilize rather than improve.

The scenario-based approach confirms that single-instrument solutions are ineffective. Mass immigration offers speed but creates long-term integration and identity risks; pronatalist stimulation preserves cultural continuity but delivers weak and delayed results; diaspora engagement is symbolically important yet quantitatively insufficient; and technological substitution accepts depopulation at the cost of spatial and social fragmentation. Selective human capital migration improves demographic quality but remains constrained by global competition and institutional credibility.

Ukraine’s case has broader relevance beyond national borders. Aging societies such as Japan and South Korea have already demonstrated that high technological capacity can coexist with sustained depopulation, while China’s rapid aging highlights the long-term consequences of delayed demographic adjustment. Many EU member states, particularly in Southern, Central, and Eastern Europe, face similar challenges of low fertility, aging, and labor shortages, albeit without the shock of war. In this sense, Ukraine represents a compressed demographic laboratory, where processes that unfold gradually elsewhere are occurring simultaneously and under extreme pressure.

The key lesson for both Ukraine and the European Union is that demographic security must be treated as a long-term governance function, grounded in indicator-based monitoring, policy realism, and institutional continuity. Success should be measured not by population growth itself, but by the ability to maintain acceptable thresholds of life expectancy, dependency ratios, migration balance, and social sustainability.

1. Vagner, V. (2024). Does Ukraine have the potential to recover its population? NV. https://nv.ua/ukr/opinion/naselennya-ukrajini-2024-likarka-pro-riven-smertnosti-ta-narodzhuvanosti-50472833.html (Accessed 1 December 2025).

2. Marushchak, O. (2025). War in Ukraine until 2030: A demographer explains how many Ukrainians will remain. TSN.ua. https://tsn.ua/exclusive/viyna-v-ukrayini-do-2030-roku-demohraf-rozpoviv-skilky-zalyshytsia-ukrayintsiv-2846402.html (Accessed 1 December 2025).

3. Saienko, K. (2024). Ukraine is shrinking and aging: Will the population reach 34 million by 2030? Frontliner. https://frontliner.ua/en/ukraine-is-shrinking-and-aging/ (Accessed 1 December 2025).

4. Ministry of Economic Development and Trade of Ukraine (2013, October 29). On approval of methodological recommendations for calculating the level of economic security of Ukraine (Order No. 1277), [Online], available at: https://zakon.rada.gov.ua/rada/show/v1277731-13#Text (Accessed 1 December 2025).

5. Vorobiov, M. (2025). How to fix Ukraine’s people shortage: Russia’s war has pushed Ukraine into the demographic abyss. Center for European Policy Analysis. https://cepa.org/article/how-to-fix-ukraines-people-shortage/ (Accessed 1 December 2025).