Babies born in bomb shelters as Ukraine population plummets

Deep beneath Kyiv, midwives are busy in a bomb shelter-turned-labour ward, where flickering lights cut through the dark to cast long shadows along its cold, concrete halls.

- Danielle Robertson, Reuters

It's here, far below the sounds and scars of war, that new lives begin — but births are few and far between as Ukraine's population plummets after more than three years of conflict and the mass exodus that Russia's invasion triggered. As war drags on without relent, Ukraine faces a quieter - if more existential - crisis: demographic collapse. Since the war began in 2022, the population has shrunk by more than IO million, or around a quarter.

The country now has one of the world's lowest birth rates and one of the highest death rates - 18.6 deaths per 1,000 people, according to the US Central Intelligence Agency. The birth rate has simultaneously fallen to about 0.9 children per woman, down from 1.16 before 2022, according to a government official. The United Nations says that is one of the world's lowest - and experts say action is vital now to head off future fallout. Hundreds of thousands of people of reproductive age have been killed or wounded and millions more have fled - many with no plans to return.

"The demographic situation is really dark," said Olga Oleinikova, a Ukrainian-born associate professor at the University of Technology Sydney. She said that unless Ukraine reforms its crumbling healthcare system and addresses the trauma caused by war, the death toll will keep climbing-and long after conflict ends.