Highlighting demographic consequences of conflict in Ukraine

Professor Ridhi Kashyap and Professor Melinda Mills undertook research to develop an innovative metric to monitor population displacement in Ukraine following Russia’s invasion. It provided one of the only quantitative estimates of internal displacement in virtual realtime, combining daily United Nations data on how many people cross the Ukrainian border with the researchers’ daily data on active Facebook users to monitor population displacement across Ukraine provinces. The metric considers the percentage of people who were active on Facebook before the invasion to mitigate any bias. This contributed to the United Nations revising their initial internal displacement estimate of 1.6 million people around three weeks after Russia’s invasion to 6.5 million as of March 2022.

Professor Hill Kulu and Dr Júlia Mikolai investigated the effect of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine on the future of Ukraine’s population. They conducted a series of population projections with different assumptions on the number of casualties and refugees, and the refugees’ likelihood of return by different political scenarios. The study showed that Russia’s invasion has not only led to immense human and economic costs in Ukraine in the present, but also carries long-term demographic repercussions. With war casualties and a large portion of the Ukrainian population seeking safety abroad from the conflict, the country’s population is projected to decline by one‐third.

Professor Jakub Bijak contributed to a workshop on ‘The demography of Ukraine and the challenges of war and humanitarian crisis’ co-hosted by the Federal Institute for Population Research in Germany in April 2022.

Further reading

Nowcasting daily population displacement in Ukraine through social media advertising data (Population and Development Review)

The war, refugees, and the future of Ukraine’s population (Population, Space and Place)