On Thursday, December 11th, Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky said that the U.S. was pushing Kiev to make territorial concessions to Russia to stop the war, letting Russia get eastern parts of Ukraine, which would then become a “demilitarized free economic zone.”
It is astonishing that the negotiations are about percentages of territories, whether it is 2½ per cent or, with Crimea, another 4½ per cent that Ukraine should allegedly give up. All this talk of percentages, but there is no mention of Ukraine’s drastic demographic changes – as Ukraine’s and Central Europe’s Institutes’ report in details.
According to them, Ukraine’s population was 52.2 million after the Soviet Union’s disintegration. The latter dropped to 42.99 million just before Russia’s annexation of Crimea. By now, according to estimates from the Ministry of Foreign Affairs of Ukraine, the total number of Ukrainians abroad as of 21 June 2023 was 8.177 million (including those who left before the Russian invasion). The Ukrainian Institute of the Future calculated that Ukraine’s total population as of May of 2023 was a mere 29 million, though others estimate it at 25 million.
The various demographic Institutes also note that Ukraine has the lowest fertility rate in the world, just below 1, when replacement would mean sustaining a 2.1 figure. This low figure is not surprising since many who left since the start of the war were younger women. How many Ukrainians, now in mainly European countries, would return when the war stops? Nobody really knows.
The facts are that since 1993, Ukraine’s population has dropped by 50 percent. In one generation, under simplistic assumptions using the 25 million domestic population and 1 fertility rate numbers, Ukraine’s population would decline to 12.5 million.
It may get lower. Following Ukraine’s August 2025 decision allowing males aged between eighteen and twenty-two to travel internationally, there are preliminary observations that by late October one hundred thousand Ukrainian males in the eighteen to twenty-two age brackets had entered Poland. And Germany’s Interior Ministry noted that the number of young Ukrainian men registering there had risen tenfold from around one hundred per week to almost a thousand after August.
All these numbers combined make it incomprehensible why the negotiations are about territory percentages, when prosperity depends not on territories, but on the movement on people – the young and skilled. A place that’s losing them in huge numbers, as Ukraine had already begun to before the war, implies not just drastically diminished prosperity, but drastically diminished ability for Ukraine to project itself militarily against neighboring, war-mongering countries.
It’s no doubt true that when agriculture was the dominant sector, or natural resources such as oil pre-eminent, wars over territories could be rationalized. And Ukraine was once known as the “breadbasket of Europe” because of its fertile soil, not to mention an impressive natural resource endowment too. But it would need people to sustain and protect these sectors which, with such a desperate demographic profile, will increasingly not be possible.
Territories, even 2 to 6 percent territories, surely still matter when the width of the country where most of the population resides (as is the case with Israel) is just a few miles from enemy lands. Though even in such a case, as the October 7 war showed, Israel’s brain power, the young who made the place a “start-up nation,” was a crucial factor not just preventing much civilian casualties with the Iron Dome and other technological innovations, but winning the war. Ukraine, however, is not a territorially minuscule country, though if its demographic patterns persist, it would become a minuscule one in an 8 billion populated world, particularly with its youth and skilled gone.
Historians and political scientists can speculate endlessly about the emphasis on territory and borders when there are such massive migrations, not only from Ukraine, but around the world. Yes, Russia’s President, Vladimir Putin may revive memories of Mother Russia, and enormous Soviet borders. And Kiev may remind the world that “Russia,” historically started in Kiev, and was the first center of Orthodox Christianity centuries ago.
Although politicians cite such historical memories, they do not drive the present Russia’s or other places’ conflicts. The quest for legitimacy of new regimes is behind the conflicts. After the 1917 revolution, Moscow relied on “communism” to legitimize its power. After the fall of the Soviet Union, there was a void. Some mistakenly thought that countries without any history of institutions dispersing power, such as Russia, could nevertheless be promptly “shocked” into Western Europe’s models of society. This was sheer academic hallucination. Instead, Moscow reverted to nationalism and borders that defined Mother Russia to justify legitimacy and continued concentration of powers.
War and territory reflect such quests for legitimacy – and always did, and at all times.
Napoleon addressed Metternich after the victorious battles of Bautzen and Wurschen in 1813 with these words: “Your sovereigns, born to the throne, may suffer 20 defeats and still keep returning to their capitals. I cannot. I am an upstart soldier. My rule will not survive the day on which I have ceased to be strong and feared.” More recently, since replacing the Shah, Iran’s ayatollahs refer to Israel as Muslim’s “sacred territory,” echoing Napoleon. This is one reason arts of real estate deals do not quite resonate either with Russia or in the Middle East. Meanwhile people vote with their feet – when they can.
