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What will be left of Ukraine after Russia and the West are done with their proxy war?
It's hard to get good numbers as both Russia and Ukraine lie about everything. But it feels that Ukraine is exhausted and will soon lose this war. My heuristic for this is reading between the lines of the news. Every optimistic story about Ukraine's war effort in the last year has failed to bear fruit. And nuggets of facts go unchallenged, such as the average age of Ukraine's soldiers now being 42.
The U.S. estimate as of August (according to Wikipedia) is that 70,000 Ukrainian soldiers have been killed with another 120,000 wounded. I would treat this as a floor, personally. The Ukrainian forces at the start of the war were 200,000 regular soldiers and 100,000 paramilitary. I think it's safe to say these troops have been utterly gutted. The size of the Ukrainian army is reportedly 800,000 today but at this point it must be nearly entirely conscripts. Conscripts with an average age of 42. To channel George Carlin, think of the average 42 year old. How would they fare in a trench? Now realize half of Ukrainian soldiers are older than that.
Millions of people have fled Ukraine. The population (as of 2022) had already declined from 51 million to 36 million within the 1991 borders. It is likely much lower today. We will soon see the first instance in more than 150 years of a country losing half its population. (Either the Potato Famine or the Paraguayan War seem like the last potential candidates for this happening).
What people don't realize is how incredibly RARE this is. The population of other war-torn regions such as Afghanistan and Iraq has skyrocketed. You can't even see the conflicts on a population chart. Syria had a brief decline but has rebounded and is now higher than ever before. The population of Russia dipped during WWII by about 10% but by 1955 had rebounded again to an all-time high.
The combination of low fertility, huge emigration, and war deaths will depopulate Ukraine to a degree that hasn't been seen in modern times.
I have to ask, at this point, why does the West still support Ukraine? Yes, it's very convenient that Ukraine is willing to destroy itself to hurt Russia. But, as a utilitarian, I am very skeptical of the benefits of "grand strategy" type decisions like this. The world is complicated. If we let Putin have the Russian-speaking parts of Ukraine will he then demand the Polish-speaking parts of Poland? No. It's not like this war has been a resounding success. Furthermore, he could die tomorrow.
But the deaths suffered by Ukrainian conscripts (and yes Russian conscripts too) are very real. We are trading the deaths of real people for theoretical future benefits. And we are destroying an entire country in the process. Why not go to the bargaining table and end this cruel and pointless war?
I don't have much substantial to add but just wanted to note that I hadn't seen Russian casualties during WWII laid out in percentage terms and I was honestly shocked it is this low. If WWII is somewhat a story of the US's vast industrial capacity and Russia vast population capacity combining together it was fascinating to see it laid out in such stark terms.
Presumably they were furiously procreating during those years as well! So the decline would have been much more if not for that. And young men were hit much harder as they always are. Nearly 80% of boys born in 1922 wouldn't survive until 1946!
Conflict tends to increase the TFR. But I bet this one will be different. Emigration is such an attractive alternative to staying and fighting/breeding.
I'm actually interested to see how the mirror question of this will affect Russian population. Between white collar flight at the outbreak (see our own «» enthusiast),
depending on whose numbers you use casualty rates approaching that 10% of population mark (US estimate 120k, UN population at 144mn)with a similar though not quite as bad population pyramid as the rest of the developed world, how Russia as country of Russians will come out of this win or lose will be interesting and likely different from before.That's the flipside. But the fact that Russia has been able to hold its own despite huge aid from Western countries ($100 billion? $200 billion?) means that once the Western aid is withdrawn, it's over. Russia has 4x the population and infinite natural resources to sell to China.
It was over when the sanctions failed, IMO. Russia is having no problem selling its oil. We live in a multi-polar world now with China able to defy the US with zero consequences.
(p.s. You are off by two orders of magnitude on the casualty numbers. 0.1% not 10%).
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Isn't 120k/144m more like 0.1% than 10%?
Yeah, messed that up using the comma separator as a bad indexing point.
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