Ukraine is in trouble. It is losing the war in Eastern Europe, it is losing its land, and it is losing its people.
Ukraine’s demographic survival is in danger: it is wasting away. Since the conflict in Ukraine began in 2014, millions of Ukrainians have fled to friends and relatives in Russia and millions more fled to Europe, Canada, and elsewhere. Many now say they do not plan to return. The population has declined by at least eight million since Russia invaded in 2022.
Ukrainian civilians are not just leaving. Ukrainian soldiers are being killed. By some estimates, as many as three-quarters of a million Ukrainian soldiers have been killed. By now, that number may be higher.
Making matters worse, the numbers lost to emigration and war are not being replaced. Ukraine now has the lowest life expectancy of any country in Europe. In every region, deaths outnumber births. And in many, there are at least four deaths for each birth. A CIA report ranks Ukraine as having both the highest death rate and the lowest birth rate in the world.
A nation that was once one of the largest in Europe is shrinking: Ukraine was once the seventh largest country in Europe with a prewar population of fifty-two million. It now has a population of between twenty-six million, if you exclude Russian controlled areas, and an optimistic forty million. While life expectancy for women remains at 70.9, for men it had dropped to 57.3 by 2024.
The staggering number of deaths on the battlefield combined with the two million who are avoiding military service and the 200,000 who have deserted has created a critical manpower shortage for a nation that already was at a population disadvantage to Russia. On August 28, Kyrylo Budanov, Head of the Office of the President of Ukraine, said Ukraine “cannot mobilise fewer than 30,000 people a month. This is the minimum number needed to maintain what we have.” That suggests the Ukrainian armed forces is losing a thousand soldiers a day to death, serious injury, and desertion.
The scarcity of troops has left mile wide gaps in the Ukrainian armed forces’ defensive lines that Russian forces are exploiting to advance on the cities of Ukraine’s fortress belt that are crucial for Ukraine to hold onto if they are to stop Russia from its goal of capturing the entirety of Donbas.
As a shortage of manpower is hampering Ukraine’s ability to defend itself on the ground, so a shortage of air defense interceptors is crippling its ability to defend itself in the air. Ukraine is out, or nearly out, of Patriot interceptors, the only defense they have against Russian ballistic missiles. The result is that those missiles, and the even more advanced hypersonic missiles, are hitting targets in Ukraine at will. And there seem to be no Patriot interceptors to be found.
Ukraine is attempting to match Russian strikes from the sky with their own deep strikes in Russia. Effective to a point, these strikes have two limitations. One is that the damage done by Ukrainian drones is significantly smaller than the damage done by Russia’s much larger and more powerful missiles. Even Ukraine’s new Flamingo cruise missile, now that it is being tested in the field, seems to be proving too slow and inaccurate to make a real impact. According to some reports, only six of thirty-nine launched missiles have hit their target.
The other is that the percentage of Ukrainian drones that hit their target is shrinking. Ukraine has to launch an exorbitant number of drones to strike a small number of targets, challenging the long-term cost-benefit ratio.
Ukraine is not only facing challenges hitting targets with their drones. They are facing serious challenges defending against Russian drones. Russia’s new jet engine model of their Geren drone reaches speeds that far outpace Ukraine’s interceptor drones.
This new challenge is hurting Ukraine not only in the air war, but in the economic war. These drone-cruise missile hybrids, along with inexpensive Banderol cruise missiles, are raining havoc on Odessa’s port, making it difficult for weapons to get into Ukraine and for agricultural and mining products to get out. In August, no ships docked in Odessa’s ports, allowing Ukraine to export only 30% of the grain it needs to ship. Some mining operations have suspended or scaled back operations. Overall, the closed ports are costing Ukraine around $70 million a day.
Ukraine is struggling not only with the war with the foreign enemy but also with domestic instability. Once lionized by the Western world and invincible at home, Ukraine’s president, Volodymyr Zelensky, is now facing challenges.
This year, for the first time, Zelensky has faced unfamiliar resistance from within his own party. Several MP’s of his Servant of the People party have boycotted, defected parties or rebelled. Bills introduced by the government have struggled to gain the votes to pass.
The recent firing of the minister of defense, Mykhailo Fedorov, has created a split that has not healed. Last month, Fedorov called for wartime elections. His call did not resonate and went unheeded. But, though Russia and the United States have called for elections in Ukraine, this is the first time since the war started that there has been a call for elections from within Ukraine.
Fedorov said that Ukrainians “must find a legal, safe, realistic mechanism that will allow Ukraine to restore a full democratic process even amidst a prolonged war.” He said that “democracy cannot be held hostage.” He spoke of a “systemic crisis of government,” accusing Zelensky’s government of corruption, of stealing money and of nepotism and injustice.
Zelensky’s ratings, once in the stratosphere, have begun to fall, according to three metrics. The first is polling that suggests that only 28% of Ukrainians say they want to see Zelensky stay on as president after the war. According to some polling, only 20.3% of Ukrainians would vote for Zelensky in the next election, though that is still one point ahead of former Commander-in-Chief Valeriy Zaluzhny, his closest competitor. One recent poll had Zelensky at 22.3%, Zaluzhny at 21.4%, and Fedorov at 13.1%.
Other polling suggests that Zelensky would lose to Zaluzhny. Some readings of “closed polls” show that he would probably also lose to Kyrylo Budanov, Zelensky’s chief of staff.
In an electoral system that typically requires a second runoff round, Zelensky is struggling with another important metric. He has the highest number of Ukrainians who say they would never vote for him, meaning he would likely lose any runoff matchup.
In a shifting field of still hypothetical candidates, perhaps the most threatening metric for Zelensky is that his trust rating is on the decline. Polling by the Kyiv International Institute of Sociology in January indicates that 72% of Ukrainians trust Zaluzhny and 70% trust Budanov, while only 62% trust Zelensky. That number is continuing to fall. By April, Zelensky’s number had fallen to 58%.
One reason for Zelensky’s falling numbers is the corruption Fedorov spoke of. More Ukrainians now feel that corruption threatens their country more than the Russian war by a score of 54% to 39%. A fifth of the people who do not trust Zelensky identify corruption as the cause.
And things aren’t getting better. As with the war against Russia, Ukraine is losing the war against corruption. Its spectacular corruption scandal is consistently getting worse. The $100 million kickback scheme investigated by Ukraine’s National Anti-Corruption Bureau (NABU) and the Specialized Anti-Corruption Prosecutor’s Office (SAPO) found that high-level officials bribed energy contractors between 10-15% of their contracts’ value. Some of those contracts were for defensive fortifications to protect energy infrastructure that was being bombed by Russia. And while those strikes left many Ukrainians without power, tapes obtained by NABU seem to contain conversations about delaying these fortification projects to obtain maximum profit on kickbacks from more lucrative alternatives.
The original round of investigations snared people in Zelensky’s closest orbit, including Zelensky’s powerful chief of staff, Andriy Yermak.
A second round of tapes appear to show people who are very close to Zelensky influencing then-Defense Minister Rustem Umerov’s decisions on very important and very lucrative defense contracts. The tapes also appear to capture conversations about luxury estates that were financed by the corruption scheme, including one that is allegedly for Yermak.
And now, more people in Zelensky’s inner circle have been implicated. The newest wiretap recordings to be released reveal Iryna Mudra, deputy head of Zelensky’s presidential office, saying that an official in the presidential office more senior than she said, “Defeating corruption is the wrong approach. It needs to be systematised and controlled.” Depending on the timing of the wiretap, the only official senior to Mudra was Yermak or Budanov. Mudra has been placed in custody and fired by Zelensky. She has been charged with organized crime, money laundering and corporate raiding.
The war in Ukraine might have been prevented if the United States and NATO had taken Russia’s security concerns seriously and sincerely negotiated Russia’s December 2021 Security proposals. The war in Ukraine might have been stopped early if the U.S. and United Kingdom had encouraged the promising negotiations instead of encouraging Ukraine to go on fighting. Now that the situation has grown so bleak for Ukraine, it is time to return to those negotiations and save the country the West pushed to be its proxy.
