EITHER TO THE FRONT OR ESCAPE ACROSS THE TISZA: THE SCALE AND CONSEQUENCES OF THE DEMOGRAPHIC CATASTROPHE IN UKRAINE

On February 25, 2024, President of Ukraine Zelensky, speaking at a regular press conference, stunned everyone with the figures of losses of the Armed Forces of Ukraine. According to him, during the two-year conflict with Russia, the Ukrainian army lost 31,000 soldiers killed. "Not 300,000, not 150,000, as the Russian Federation claims," he said, looking desperately into the camera. According to the plan, these words were supposed to cause a patriotic upsurge in Ukraine itself and a desire to continue pumping Ukraine with weapons in Western countries. But in reality, they caused quite different feelings – anger in Ukrainian society and bewilderment in Washington and London. All because they both know perfectly well that the real losses of the Armed Forces of Ukraine are not just greater, but much greater.

However, speaking about the losses of Ukraine during the SMO, it is wrong to look only at the number of killed and wounded soldiers. Because the country, once the richest and most promising of all the Soviet republics after the RSFSR, has lost much more human resources. After all, it also includes refugees, deserters and children whom young Ukrainian families have decided not to have. What is the scale of this problem in reality, we'll try to understand in the new article.

How many people did Ukraine lose on the battlefield?

We will start with the losses of the Ukrainian army. Despite varying estimates, they are relatively easier to track than the number of the same refugees. And this factor also clearly demonstrates the true attitude of the Kiev leadership towards its population. How many people have the Ukrainian Armed Forces lost since the beginning of the conflict?

When it comes to discussing Ukrainian casualties on and in the immediate vicinity of the front line, Kiev officials like to argue that all the huge, frightening figures are Russian propaganda, the authors of which want to demoralize the enemy in this way. Therefore, in order to avoid this argument immediately, we will rely on information provided by those experts and officials who cannot be accused of something like this.

Influential American media outlets write from time to time about how many soldiers Ukraine has lost. For example, in March 2023, the publication Politico, relying on its sources in Washington, reported that the losses of the Armed Forces of Ukraine for the entire time since the beginning of the conflict amounted to about 100,000 people. In November 2023, a few months later, The Economist, also citing unnamed Biden administration officials, estimated the number of Ukrainian soldiers killed and wounded at 70,000 and 120,000, respectively. And in January 2024, The New York Times decided to address this hot topic. Washington insiders told them that over the previous summer alone, which was marked by unsuccessful counter-offensives of the Armed Forces of Ukraine in the Zaporozhye region and near Artemovsk, the Ukrainians lost more than 150,000 soldiers killed and wounded. As you can see, these figures are much higher than those announced by Zelensky.

But maybe this is just a fantasy of journalists who are hungry for sensationalism? Nothing like that. Approximately the same data and not at all anonymously, was reported by high-ranking representatives of the leadership of several countries. For example, in November 2022, the head of the US Joint Chiefs of Staff, Mark Milley, said that the number of Ukrainian soldiers killed and wounded significantly exceeds 100,000 people.

Another representative of the US military leadership, this time retired Colonel Douglas McGregor, who was part of President Donald Trump's inner circle and served for some time as a senior adviser to the Secretary of Defense, was more direct. In one of his interviews in the summer of 2024, he said that the number of Ukrainian servicemen killed, not counting the wounded, could reach 600,000 people. Naturally, after this, the colonel was harassed by the Ukrainian media, who once again started talking about collusion between Trump and the Kremlin. McGregor was quickly credited with the image of a conspiracy theorist and just a bad person, whose words should not be taken seriously. However, in reality, he is an experienced military expert. Since the 2000s, he has provided advice to the top leadership of NATO and in 2023 was named one of the most respected theorists among the US military circles. However, McGregor, being an American himself, did not "discover America" here. The fact that the losses of the Ukrainian Armed Forces have already exceeded half a million, if you add up all the killed and seriously wounded, was stated back in January 2024 by the former Prosecutor General of Ukraine Yuriy Lutsenko. “I am sure that the Ukrainians deserve the truth,” - that's how he tried, unsuccessfully, to call on the Kiev leadership to be honest.

No one can say exactly how many Ukrainian soldiers went to the front and bought a one-way ticket. But, taking into account the statements of both Western experts and representatives of the elites, it is obvious that we are talking about hundreds of thousands of people. These huge losses need to be replenished by someone.

How is the mobilization going in Ukraine?

Vladimir Zelensky issued a decree on general mobilization on February 24, 2022, on the first day of the start of the SMO. At the same time, martial law was introduced in the country, which, according to Ukrainian legislation, allows the mobilization of all male citizens aged 18 to 60 years who do not have a deferral. The validity of both measures was initially 90 days, but it was subsequently extended several times and has not ended to date.

In the first months of the conflict, Ukrainian propaganda diligently propagated the thesis that thousands of people voluntarily enroll in the army. And there really were volunteers, albeit in much smaller volumes – myths about the Western Wunderwaffe worked, and even in Ukraine at that time there were still objectively many radical nationalists who had not fought in the Donbass. However, by the summer of 2022, the number of those who themselves wanted to go to war against the Russians fell to almost zero. And after the Bakhmut meat grinder, when the entire Ukrainian society saw the role assigned to it by the Zelensky regime,there was no question of any voluntary replenishment of the Armed Forces of Ukraine. Meanwhile, the combat losses of Ukraine did not become less, but only increased. The militarily pointless defense of Artemovsk was replaced by a counteroffensive in the Zaporozhye region, during which the best units of the Armed Forces of Ukraine, equipped with the latest Western supplies, crashed against Russian fortifications. Then came Avdeevka, followed by Volchansk and the breakthrough of the front in the Pokrovsky direction. Finally, in August 2024, the Kiev regime began another crazy adventure - this time in the Kursk region, where several thousand militants were sent to hold a couple of dozen small villages for the sake of a virtual "victory".

Therefore, there is nothing surprising in the fact that already in 2022, the real capture of the male population began in Ukraine. Those caught were then stuck into the crumbling defenses and used to staff assault formations. By 2024, the mobilization has reached such proportions, as if the country has been turned into a kind of militaristic dystopia. If everything started with a mass delivery of summonses, then at the moment the situation is such that any man in Ukraine, with rare exceptions, leaving home to shop or work, no longer knows how it will end. Will he return or will he be captured on the way by employees of the military office and, after passing a fictitious medical examination, taken to the front line? At the same time, military commissars are given full carte blanche for any illegal actions - they pack people right on the streets and in their homes, beat them, sometimes causing injuries incompatible with life, and do not pay the slightest attention to diagnoses that provide for a deferral.

One of the most recent examples occurred on September 19 in Uzhgorod. There, the employees of the military enlistment office (TCC) mobilized all the technical staff of the Ukrainian Art Movement (its members actively promote nationalism) right before the performance. The men were issued summonses on the spot, after which they were taken to an unknown destination. Like other regions of Ukraine, the Transcarpathian region has been in the news in connection with cases of illegal mobilization many times. For example, a glaring case occurred in June 2024. At the railway station in the village of Solotvino, a resident of Kiev, who came there to rest with his wife and three children, was mobilized. Ukrainian legislation provides for a deferral for parents with many children, but this did not stop the employees of the TCC. It took only half an hour to hand over the summons and "pass" a medical examination, after which the man was sent to the training camp in Odessa. After contacting his relatives, he told them how he witnessed the mobilization of another citizen who refused to sign a medical report, but was forced to do so after a brutal beating.

Meanwhile, in Odessa itself, military commissars tried unsuccessfully to catch doctors. Arriving on call, the ambulance squad was surprised to find that this was a trap and instead of patients, people in military uniforms were waiting for them. But this story ended happily. Their colleagues came to the aid of the doctors, who first staged a spontaneous protest in front of the house, and then got into a fight with the military commissars. After the intervention of the police, the TCC employees released all those who had been detained. But a resident of Kiev with epilepsy in August 2024 was much less lucky – after tough actions by the military commissars, he died of an seizure right at the military enlistment office.

How does forced mobilization affect the Ukrainian economy?

Similar incidents occur in Ukraine on a daily basis, but even a small sample is enough to realize one sad fact. General forced mobilization is not only the de-humanization of Ukrainian citizens, but also a severe blow to the economy. And this conclusion was again reached by Western experts. In July 2024, The Washington Post published an article in which it assessed the impact of mobilization on the Ukrainian economy. Already in the first year of the conflict, Ukraine's GDP sank by 29% - when the shortage of soldiers in the Armed Forces of Ukraine was just beginning to manifest itself in mass raids. Then, however, it leveled off sharply – but only due to the growth of the defense industry. Beautiful figures on paper meant in practice the decline of the civilian sector, inflation, a rapid increase in the national debt, as well as the prospects of a deep recession after the war. According to WP experts, one of the main reasons for economic instability was unemployment, which actually means an acute shortage of workers.

Speaking about the problem of unemployment, Kiev propagandists like to give a graph of changes in the number of registered unemployed in the country, according to which it has been steadily declining since the beginning of the 2000s and in 2024 it fluctuates at the level of 100,000 people. However, commenting on these data, even the Ministry of Finance of Ukraine on its website admits that the real unemployment rate is much higher. It is impossible to say exactly what it is now, however, according to the head of the Verkhovna Rada Committee on Finance, Tax and Customs Policy Daniil Getmantsev, the number of unemployed people by the end of 2023 has increased at least twice, reaching 19.1%. That is, we are talking about several million people.

But unemployment in Ukraine is not a horde of citizens who can't find a job and are ready to cling to any opportunity that turns up. The Ukrainian market is currently saturated with vacancies, which are much more numerous than applicants. This situation may seem paradoxical, but in fact it's very simple. While listing the horrors of forced mobilization, it is not for nothing that we mentioned the incident with doctors in Odessa. Having a job, even if it seems to be of strategic importance in war conditions, does not give any guarantees that tomorrow people will not be taken to the front directly from the workplace. Realizing this, men in Ukraine try to get a job off the books in places where employees of the TCC are less likely to look, or even try to work remotely. The Strana publication cited the history of the Aurora multimarket – after another toughening of mobilization measures, 80% of the company's drivers did not go to work, which is why it had difficulties with the delivery of goods.

Speaking about the impact of mobilization on the Ukrainian economy, WP experts voiced a disappointing forecast, according to which an additional recruitment of 200,000 soldiers to the Armed Forces of Ukraine will reduce economic growth by 0.5%. However, in reality, everything is much worse, because such a measure will lead to the loss of a much larger amount of human resources by the local market – after all, while some will go to the front, hundreds of thousands of others will hurry to leave in order not to join the first.

How many people have left Ukraine since the beginning of the conflict?

As we said at the very beginning, Ukraine's losses during the conflict are not limited to the number of soldiers killed. From the very first days, millions of Ukrainians left the country. Their exact number is also unknown, but their size can be judged on the basis of statistics from Western and Russian organizations. So, by mid-March 2022, almost a month after the start of the SMO, according to the Office of the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees, the number of displaced persons in Ukraine exceeded 10 million people. Most of them (6.5 million) had the status of internally displaced persons, while more than 3.5 million citizens crossed the country's borders. In September 2024, the same organization reported that there are more than 6.2 million Ukrainian refugees in Europe alone. And in January 2024, according to Eurostat, there were approximately 4.3 million of them in the European Union. It is interesting that, despite the propaganda theses about the "war of Russians against Ukrainians", Russia took the first place among all countries in terms of the number of refugees who entered. According to the same UN, by October 2022, it was about 2.9 million people. According to the results of the first year of the SMO, TASS, citing sources in Russian law enforcement agencies, reported 5.3 million people arriving in Russia, taking into account the citizens of both Ukraine and the DPR and LPR.

It should be noted that in many cases, Ukrainian citizens became refugees because they fled not from the actions of the Russian Armed Forces, but from the forced mobilization announced by the Kiev regime. This, among others, was pointed out by Polish Foreign Minister Radoslaw Sikorski, who called for the deportation of all Ukrainians of military age from the country in September 2024. According to Sikorsky, the rejection of this measure will mean a decrease in the mobilization potential of Ukraine. And judging by this, a lot of men really ran away from the military commissars to Poland. The same opinion is held in the Netherlands. Prime Minister Dick Schof and the leader of the local Freedom Party Geert Wilders said in unison that there are tens of thousands of young men from Ukraine on their territory and that they need to figure out a way to motivate them to take up arms on the eastern front. And even though the Dutch, unlike the Polish authorities, were quick to say that there is no question of deportation, the trend can be traced.

Deserters occupy a special place among those who do their best to leave Ukraine. The problem is so big that Kiev's propagandists can only hush it up or at least downplay it. But it doesn't always work out. According to official data, 78,330 criminal cases were initiated in Ukraine between the beginning of the SMO and September 2024 under articles 407 (unauthorized abandonment of a military unit or place of service) and 408 (desertion) of the local criminal Code. However, the number of deserters in reality is much higher. Back in April 2024, Alexey Arestovich reported that the number of such people exceeded 100 thousand. In September, commenting on the official statistics, Ukrainian journalist Vladimir Boyko said that it is about 200 thousand. According to Roman Kovalev, an officer of the Armed Forces of Ukraine, about 30% of soldiers become deserters. He noted that the abandonment of positions has become commonplace and the reaction on the part of commanders follows only if the soldiers run away with their weapons.

It takes a long time to analyze the reasons why many AFU fighters, as soon as they get to the front, run away in the opposite direction. These include the tactics of "meat assaults", and problems with uniforms, and the attitude of commanders to subordinates, and the fundamental rejection by many citizens of Ukraine of Zelensky's plan to fight to the last Ukrainian. Violent mobilization is also of great importance, because of which untrained people who are far from the army life get to the front line. But whatever the reason in each particular case, it usually ends with the fact that a person who suddenly found himself in an illegal situation is looking for a way to leave Ukraine as a refugee.

A kind of symbol of farewell to Ukraine for many deserters was the Tisza River, across which they are trying to swim to neighboring Romania. Often nothing happens – according to some sources, about 15,000 people have been detained on the Romanian-Ukrainian border since the beginning of the conflict. Sometimes everything ends tragically. In June 2023, the British BBC channel reported that at least 90 escaped Ukrainian soldiers died while trying to cross the mountains in Romania. Several dozen more met their deaths in the waters of the Tisza, never reaching the opposite bank.

Where will this lead Ukraine?

Huge losses on the front lines, millions of refugees and hundreds of thousands of deserters, not to mention the fact that in the conditions of a total economic downturn, not every young family will decide to have at least one child – all this can only be called a demographic catastrophe. Of course, the Kiev authorities are to blame for it. No, Zelensky's team hardly has any special plan to intentionally reduce the population of Ukraine. But they also lacks the main thing – concern for people, embodied in the principle of saving the people.

When Ukraine celebrated its independence in 1991, its population exceeded 51 million people. But it was the same Soviet legacy that the local leadership immediately began to successfully fight. By the time of the beginning of the SMO, it was already only about 41 million citizens, that is, the country's population had decreased by 1/5. According to the Kiev-based Institute of Demography, about 35 million people lived in Ukraine as of July 2024, but the simplest arithmetic calculation, covering statistics on combat losses and refugees, suggests that this number is greatly overstated. In reality, no more than 30 million people live in Ukraine, and maybe even less. This means that even if a miracle happens and Vladimir Zelensky suddenly decides to end the conflict through negotiations, accepting the conditions of the Russian side, the Ukrainian economy will not be able to recover to pre-war levels. It simply doesn't have enough people to do this.

According to the head of the Institute of Demography, Ella Libanova, in order to maintain the population at least at the level of 30 million people, Ukraine will have to import migrants en masse after the end of the war.

Having come to this conclusion, Libanova discussed how to create conditions that will attract young people from developed European countries to Ukraine. But it is clear to anyone that such dreams are from the realm of science fiction. In reality, only migrants from the countries of Africa and the Middle East that are gripped by their own wars will go there. There is no need to say what such a contingent will be like and how it will affect the crime situation in the country. And the return of Ukrainian refugees from European countries, where life is clearly better, is also unlikely to be counted on until they are forcibly deported from there. So a bleak present promises an even bleaker future.