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The coming Ukraine/Russia baby boom?
There's a theory that one part of falling fertility is female hypergamy. Since my spellchecker is underlining that word, I'll define it like this:
Female hypergamy is when women seek to marry "up", either into a higher social class or to a mate who is superior to them.
It's harder than ever for women to marry up. Modern femininist societies devalue male traits such as stoicism and aggression but highly value female traits such as conformity and self-control. As a result, women's status relative to men has risen greatly. This has the side effect of making most men undesirable to most women.
You know what raises the status of men? Fighting in wars. It's no secret that women love men in uniform. And many will confess to being aroused by male violence. For better or worse, violence raises male status.
Nearly all nations had a baby boom after WWII. And this wasn't merely making up for lost time. In the United States, the fertility rate peaked at 3.74 children/woman in 1957. Even Russia had a fertility rate near 3 despite a ridiculously lopsided gender ratio where more than 80% of men born in 1922 didn't survive until 1946.
So anyway... I predict that Russia and Ukraine will experience a similar (but smaller boom) in the decade following the end of the war.
Ukraine's demographic pyramid says no
The future of Ukraine is Somali and Bangladeshi migrants working on farms owned by American financial institutions and managed by HR women educated in the US. Most likely the migrants will actually find their new homeland less enticing to have children in and probably will have fewer than migrants in western countries.
As for Russia the number of Russian men who have served is far below WWII levels. There might be a small effect, but I doubt it will be significant.
Between this, and the comment below pointing out how most women of child bearing age have fled Ukraine, the outcome seems obvious. We pressured Ukraine into committing suicide. There won't be a Ukraine in 50 years. It will be an economic zone virtually devoid of native Ukrainians. If the world is lucky, it will be relatively well managed by Russian interest (minus the obligatory corruption, not like that is anything new in Ukraine), and mostly function as the bread basket of Europe same as it used to. If the world is unlucky, it will get flooded with sub room temperature IQ migrants by neoliberal NGOs and utterly cease to function in any recognizable fashion.
But the Ukrainians are over. The only question in 50 years will be, who was morally culpable for the genocide? Russia for starting the war, or the US for not letting Ukraine negotiate a peace back when their demographics would merely decline slowly, as opposed to fall off a cliff? If NATO had been hands off and Russia had won the war, there'd probably be more Ukrainians in 50 years than there will be now. I doubt there will be a million in 100 years.
No, it will not. Ukraine is the poorest country in Europe for the foreseeable future- it was before the war, and getting bombed flat didn’t help. It’s poorer than South Africa. Even third worlders do not want to live there, and if forced to- well, they’re third worlders, they can walk from there to a nicer country- which is such a low bar to clear that it includes the entirety of the balkans. Notably, Romania and Bulgaria, which are both several times wealthier than Ukraine, have functionally no third world migrants.
You have to be at least as wealthy as Mexico or Russia to attract migrants. Ukraine is as poor compared to those countries as they are to the US and Germany.
My uneducated question to all this is - dude, why does Russia want Ukraine so bad if it was poor before and it's even poorer now? That's like China absorbing North Korea, isn't it? How is this not a net loss for Russia? They spend a bunch of money, catch a bunch of sanctions, kill a lot of people, and get a crappy broken country when they inevitably win.
Because much of Ukraine is Russian. They speak Russian. They are Russian ethnically and live in a region historically called Novorossiya. The Eastern half of Ukraine is particularly Russian and there are considerable nationalist feelings within Russia about their co-Russians - which prompted the initial civil war in 2014. Strelkov and his band showed up and joined with locals to fight the Ukrainian army in Donetsk and Luhansk, now annexed. Strelkov is not the biggest Putin supporter in the world, he was imprisoned by the authorities. There's grassroots nationalist feeling in Russia that Putin has to respond to - formerly by suppression and now by encouragement.
The western part of Ukraine actually speak Ukrainian and can't be considered Russian. They hate Russians for a bunch of reasons, including the Holodomor. They sought to celebrate Stephen Bandera as a founding father. The Russians (and Poles) consider him a genocidal war criminal. The new 2014 regime sought to restrict the Russian language and Ukrainize the population, prompting the unrest in the east of Ukraine. Russia does not want a Russia-hating state ruling over large number of Russians right next door, aligned with the West.
Furthermore, the Eastern half of Ukraine is fairly industrialized. In the Soviet era it was supposed to be interoperable with the rest of the military industrial complex, engines for Russian helicopter gunships were made there amongst other things. There's lots of mines, coal and factories, the west is more agricultural. Eastern Ukraine also is the gateway to Crimea which is the most Russian part of Ukraine. Eastern Ukraine controls water and power supplies to the quasi-island. The land bridge and Mariupol region Russia took back in 2022 is key to holding Crimea, also a major naval base.
"Historically" is less impressive if one looks at the history: Novorussiya originates from the 18th century, roughly contemporary with Voltaire. Not yesterday but neither Ye Olde Times.
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Russian-speaking Ukrainians are not the same as the ethnic Russians, especially now. My anecdotal experience and what I've heard of Ukrainian refugees in Finland is that clear majority speaks Russian (they're usually from Eastern areas since that's where the fighting is) and a clear majority also firmly supports the Ukrainian war effort. The actual ethnic Russian areas (ie. the separatist-controlled areas before 2022 and Crimea) had already been detached from Ukrainian control before 2022.
Nobody thinks that the Irish speaking English means they consider themselves English, but for some reason the idea of someone speaking Russian yet not being Russian seems very hard to understand for many.
There are some born-in-Russia Russians actively fighting against Russia, that doesn't mean they're not Russian. The commander in chief of the Ukrainian army is Russian! There are also many Ukrainians (in the geographic sense) fighting against Ukraine. This conflict has dynamics of both a civil and interstate war, identity is complicated.
Those who fled to Finland would logically be anti-Russian. The Ukrainians who fled to Russia would presumably be the opposite.
Sure, there are all sorts of people. The point is that Ukrainian-speaking Russians and ethnic Russians in Ukraine are two wholly different categories, and even if someone was applying some sort of "liberating the ethnic Russians" logic to pre-2022 conquests, it no longer would apply to the post-2022 conquests basically in any sense.
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