Ukraine recorded 73,292 births against 259,853 deaths in the first half of 2026, pushing the death-to-birth ratio to 3.55, up from 2.87 a year earlier, as births fell 15.6% y/y and deaths rose 4.4%, according to registry data circulating this week.

As IntelliNews has long argued, Ukraine has the worst demographics in the world, with the UN projecting the population could fall from a pre-war high of 46mn to just 16mn by 2050 on current fertility trends. Estimates of the current population vary wildly given the difficulty of counting people scattered by war, from around 20mn to 39mn depending on methodology, though Ukraine's own Institute of Demography puts the figure at 28mn-30mn, IntelliNews reported in March.

The regional variance is stark: a sociological survey cited by IntelliNews found Kherson region recording 12.2 deaths for every birth and Donetsk 11.2, against a still-severe 4.1-to-1 in Dnipropetrovsk.

The demographic crunch is compounding a pension crisis. Ukraine's roughly 12mn retirees, a huge share of a general population estimated at just 20mn-25mn, receive an average pension of just $163 (UAH7,273) a month, with one in four getting only around $79, according to figures shared by journalist Iuliia Mendel. A quarter of pensioners continue working just to survive, she said, and the number of registered pensioners is already down 190,000 this year.

The war has also reshaped the population along ethnic and geographic lines, with ethnic Russians in occupied and border areas tending to move to Russia while ethnic Ukrainians have followed the wider regional pattern of emigrating west — accelerating trends already under way since the 1991 collapse of the Soviet Union.

Ukraine's collapse is an extreme case of a trend playing out worldwide. IntelliNews reported last month that the world is approaching a "demographic point of no return" as it runs out of women of childbearing age relative to its ageing population — but nowhere is the crisis as acute, or as compressed in time, as in war-torn Ukraine.