Geneva — Ukraine’s population has declined by around eight million since Russia invaded in February 2022, sparking an exodus and sending birth rates plunging, the United Nations said Tuesday. The U.N. Population Fund said there had not been a census, but that there clearly had been a dramatic population decline in war-torn Ukraine.

“Overall, Ukraine’s population has declined by an estimated 10 million since 2014 and by an estimated eight million since the beginning of the full-scale invasion in 2022,”  UNFPA’s regional director for Eastern Europe and Central Asia Florence Bauer said in comments sent to journalists.

Ukraine’s population stood at around 45 million in 2014, when Russia first invaded, occupying and annexing Crimea, the agency said, citing data from the national statistics office.

By February 2022, when Russia launched its full-scale invasion of Ukraine, the population had dwindled to 43 million, and it has plummeted further to just 35 million today, it said, citing a combination of government and UNFPA data.

Speaking to journalists in Geneva, Bauer said the dramatic decline was due to “a combination of factors”.

Already before the war, Ukraine had one of the lowest birth rates in Europe, and like many countries in Eastern Europe, it had seen many young people leave in search of more opportunities abroad, she said.

But in the two and a half years since the full-scale invasion, some 6.7 million people have fled the country as refugees while the birth rate has fallen to just around one child per woman, she said.

“That’s one of the lowest in the world,” she said, stressing that this was well below the theoretical replacement rate of 2.1 children that each woman on average must have to maintain the population size.

At the same time, Bauer said, there are the “several tens of thousands of casualties (from the war), which of course add to the equation.”

Neither Ukraine nor Russia have released casualty figures since Russia launched its full-scale invasion in 2022, but U.S. officials estimated in August 2023 that at least 70,000 Ukrainian service members had been killed. Since then Russia has made incremental gains along the vast front line stretching right across the east of the country.