A chart has been doing the rounds on Twitter that appears to show a dramatic fall in the number of men in Ukraine. Two population pyramids are overlaid – one for 2021 and one for 2023 – with the latter indicating a substantially smaller young and middle-aged population:
The alleged source of the chart is a Times article by Maxim Tucker. However, the article does not currently display the chart; nor do any of the archived versions that I found. According to a Russian journalist who posted a screenshot of what appears to be the original version, “The editors of The Times realized that they showed too shocking data of the demographic catastrophe in Ukraine, and removed the corresponding graphics”.
But I’m sceptical. If the editors did in fact remove the chart (before anyone archived the article), a more plausible explanation is that it’s simply not accurate.
As you can see in the lower left-hand corner, the source of the data is given as the UN Population Division. I found the relevant page on their website, and sure enough it shows the same two population pyramids. So whoever made the chart actually did use the UN’s data. But this only means the UN is wrong!
According the UN Human Rights Commissioner, approximately 8 million people have left Ukraine since Russia’s invasion last year. So there has been a dramatic fall in population. Yet crucially, 87% of Ukrainian refugees are women. (A recent EU report gives an even higher figure of 91%.) The reason for the imbalance is simple: men are banned from leaving the country.
Despite this well known fact, the chart above shows an approximately equal sized fall in the male and female population. Which could be interpreted as showing that millions of Ukrainian men have died in battle – something that’s wildly implausible.
On 17th March, BBC News Service Russia estimated from publicly available data that up to 47,000 men have died on the Russian side. Even if Ukrainian losses are three times greater (and I don’t think they are), that would still be ‘only’ 150,000 men. This amounts to less than 1% of the pre-war male population – nowhere near as large as the change shown on the chart.
It’s possible that when the UN made the 2023 population pyramid for Ukraine, they forgot to account for the female skew among refugees, and hence divided the 8 million shortfall equally between the two sexes. I don’t know.
Ukraine faces a profound demographic crisis: the loss of millions of educated young women, many of whom may not return once the war’s over. However, there’s no evidence the country has lost millions of men.
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