Dmitry Orlov

The interesting times in which we live are becoming ever more interesting. At this point, it is becoming difficult to find any sort of expert in the West who doesn’t think that the Ukraine’s war against its own Russians, and now against Russia itself, is a lost cause. “Why give even more money and weapons to a side that has already been defeated?” they ask, then listen intently to the muffled echo they get in response. You see, the Western politicians who have given well over a hundred billion dollars to the Ukrainian cause can’t afford the loss of face that will inevitably occur should they openly admit that the cause has been lost.

Let them fester and marinade in their own poisonous juices for as long as they like; we, on the other hand, are ready to draw some conclusions about the most likely outcome for the former Ukrainian territories once the Kiev regime stops resisting and collapses. These conclusions need not be based on ideological presuppositions, political opinion or wishful thinking: we can simply look at the numbers.

At the outset of Russia’s Special Military Operation (SMO) in the Ukraine in February of 2022, there came a nasty surprise. It turned out that the Ukrainians (as a society, not as individuals living on that territory) do not feel themselves to be part of a single, brotherly people with the Russians. Moreover, more than half of that population has been led to dream of victory over Russia (based on some really preposterously inaccurate information), whereas it was initially thought that such idiotic ideas could be entertained by five-ten thousand of brain-damaged Nazis (due to iodine deficiency) from Western Ukraine. Apparently, thirty years spent in the wilderness of “Ukrainian independence” and plentiful help from American NGOs had induced such degree of mental degradation that hundreds of thousands of Ukrainians would willingly march to their certain death at the hands of the Russian army, navy and airspace force.

This nasty surprise percolated slowly through the minds of the Russian population, much of which was still very much used to thinking of Kharkov, Odessa and Kiev as great Russian cities and found the idea that their current inhabitants would disown their proud Russian heritage most shocking. But eventually certain patterns of thought emerged, which could be roughly separated into four categories:

1. Russia should annex all of the formerly Ukrainian territory and reeducate the populace.

2. Russia should annex all of the formerly Ukrainian territory and subject its populace to a filtration process, disposing of the disloyal element. Proposals of how to dispose of that element varied from forcing them to migrate westward to shipping them off to Siberia to live out their days shoveling snow.

3. Russia should annex a part of the formerly Ukrainian territory, keeping the loyal part of the population and banishing the disloyal to the remaining, notionally “independent” part.

4. Russia shouldn’t annex anything but just build a really high fence to prevent the Ukrainians from jumping over it and mining the strip of land next to the fence in case someone does jump over it.

It bears pointing out that the proponents of each of these four approaches were making the same fundamental mistake by assuming that there will be a Ukrainian population for them to somehow deal with. But the Ukrainian population has already dwindled, and will continue to dwindle, to a point that in a mere decade or two there won’t be much of a population left to discuss. This development will not come about because of war or pestilence or famine, but mere demographics. Looking at the numbers, a different question comes to the fore: not what to do with the Ukrainian population, but what population can replace it in order to control and make productive use of this vast and increasingly underpopulated territory.

The most realistic estimate of the current population of territories still under Kiev’s control is less than 20 million people. At the beginning of the SMO, the Kiev regime asserted that its population was 40 million (without Crimea but with the Donbass). In reality, there were no more than 35 million people living on territories under the Kiev regime’s control. And if you subtract the 3 to 5 million who permanently resided abroad, the number was closer to 30 million.

That is, over the two and a half years of the SMO the Ukraine lost between 10 and 15 million people. It seems unlikely that the SMO will run longer than three years (it could be less) and over this time total losses (those killed or dead from natural causes) among both the military and the civilians will be around a million people. According to the official Kiev regime figures, the population dwindled by 332.000 in 2022 and by 209.000 in 2023. The number of all deaths (not the ones at the front) was stated as 541.000 for 2022 and 496.000 for 2023. Keep in mind that these numbers are decidedly optimistic because the regime tried to paint as rosy a picture as possible. It is unclear where these statistics include those missing in action and deserters (a huge number) or those who quietly moved to the Russian side as battle front advanced (another huge number).

In any case, it is hard to come up with less than a million lost over three years, while a more realistic projection is for a million and a half and maybe even two, and the majority of them will have died not in battle but from natural causes: reduced quality of life, worsening access to medicine, etc.

Keep in mind that the above numbers are for demographic losses, which is deaths minus births (there are still some babies being born in the Ukraine, although fewer and fewer). The coefficient of fertility for 2024 stands at 0.71 per woman while it needs to be at least 2.1 merely to hold the population constant. That is, the size of the cohort of each next generation of Ukrainians is going to be a third of the previous generation.

Over the duration of the SMO, the former Ukraine will have lost between one and two million out of an initial maximum of 20 million. Right now the Ukraine’s borders are closed (huge bribes are charged for getting out) but once the battle front crumbles, along with the Kiev regime, three or four million people will flee to the European Union (as estimated by the Europeans themselves).

Who will be first in line to flee? Obviously all of the politicians, war correspondents, political experts and others who fear Russian justice due to their involvement in war crimes and crimes against humanity, will flee first. They will be followed by a large portion of the remaining businessmen, who are convinced that the Russians will take their businesses away. Next will be the young people, who have been persuaded to think that they are Europeans and only see their future in the developed and prosperous West, not in the horrible, destitute Russian Federation (or so they have been persuaded to think).

People between the ages of 20 and 30 form the majority of those who voluntarily evacuate ahead of the advancing Russian army. And let’s not forget Ukrainian “intellectuals” — artists, writers, scientists who have struggled valiantly at the futile task of fashioning an artificial, non-Russian Ukrainian art, literature and science, and whose questionable skills will be of no use to anyone. Last but not least, the reverends of the various “Ukrainian” churches and charismatic and extremist sects will clear out as well, since Russia takes a very dim view of such practices. In all, a number of between three and five million people, estimated by the Europeans, seems reasonable.

Twenty million minus a million or two dead minus three to five gone gives us between 16 and 13 million left. Most of these will be elderly, with a fertility rate of zero. And most of these will be from rural areas, who don’t care a whit about the government and just don’t want to go anywhere. This population will simply age out and disappear.

What then is to be done about the large cities (of over a million inhabitants) in the central Ukraine and relatively large cities in the western Ukraine? They will be much too large for the remaining population and there will be no hope of maintaining them or keeping the utilities (heat, electricity, running water, public transportation) running given maximally worn out infrastructure and nonexistent resources. Most likely, these once huge cities, built under the Soviet Union and barely maintained by the Ukrainians, will become ghost cities.

It may turn out to be less of a problem for Russia to absorb the 13 to 16 million who will be left. Russia has already absorbed seven million former Ukrainian citizens just over then past decade and over 10 million if you include the entire period of Ukrainian pseudo-independence than to deal with the remaining population in situ. But this leaves unanswered a big question: How will Russia maintain control of a large, unpopulated territory? How will the Wild Field be resettled?

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