Losses of Ukrainians in the Second World War and today: analogies and differences

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In May 2023, the Confederation of Employers of Ukraine stated that Ukraine had lost access to more than 30% of the working population. Before the war, the workforce of Ukraine was 17.4 million people, of which 8.3 million were women and 9.1 million were men of working age. After the full-scale invasion, the situation changed dramatically. As of the beginning of 2023, 4.6 million Ukrainians were outside Ukraine, of which 3.2 million were women of working age. 3 million people lived in the territories temporarily occupied from the beginning of 2022, of which approximately 1.3 million are of working age. In addition, 1 million citizens were mobilized to protect the state. Such losses can already be compared with the Second World War. True, then this order of numbers applied to the officially dead, but now it is not easier for Ukraine: people are either abroad, or under occupation, or in the army, or have died or lost their ability to work. About this and other analogies in the walls of the National Museum of the History of Ukraine in the Second World War, a discussion was organized for World Population Day. It is celebrated on July 11 – in 1987, on this day, it was announced that 5 billion people live on the globe. The population of the Earth is increasing, but Ukraine is not in this trend – already in 1990, it experienced another so-called demographic cross in the 20th century – when the death rate exceeded the birth rate, and since then there are no more than 52 million of us. Moreover, as Oleksandr Gladun from the Institute of Demography of the National Academy of Sciences of Ukraine said at the discussion, the war unleashed against us brought back to Ukrainian soil the phenomenon of excess mortality – the difference between the actual number of deaths and its hypothetical number in the absence of a catastrophic event. According to preliminary estimates, excess mortality in Ukraine in 2014-2021 amounted to 129,000 people. It is definitely difficult to talk about losses from the beginning of 2022. Discussion in the National Museum of the History of Ukraine in the Second World War. Photo: Roman Pupenko Not only because the losses of the Armed Forces are classified, but we cannot imagine the scale of the losses in the temporarily occupied territories. Even in the graves in Bucha that were reburied in April 2022, there are people who have not been officially recognized as dead – identification processes, searches for DNA of relatives, etc. are underway. What can we say about the number of children killed by Russia – it is officially considered that 494 children were killed, and this number can be seen on the board in front of the visual space “Children” created in the Upper Gate of the War Museum. There is no doubt that this number will soon increase again, but we all know that it is incomplete. Yulii Morozov, a public figure from Kryvyi Rih, recently wrote that since the beginning of the large-scale invasion, the number of teenage suicides in the city has quadrupled: “In fact, these are also children killed by the Russians.” We understand this, but we cannot cover it with statistics – at most such cases will add to the level of supermortality. It is officially believed that 494 Ukrainian children were killed in the full-scale war. Photo: Roman Kabachii It should also be remembered that the figures of losses often become objects of speculation. Let’s at least mention the scandal with the overestimation of the number of people killed during the Holodomor, carried out by Olesya Stasyuk, who was recently finally dismissed from the post of director of the Holodomor-Genocide Museum. She and some historians from her circle claim that 10.5 million Ukrainians died, not 3.9 million, as is commonly believed. This gave rise to distrust both in science and in the historical policy of the state as such. Oleksandr Lysenko from the Institute of History of the National Academy of Sciences, who also participated in the conversation, recalled how the Soviet Union manipulated the figures of the dead. At first, they were overestimated to increase the USSR’s contribution to the victory, leveling off the importance of the Western Front, and then they were underestimated, so as not to betray their inability during the war or simply the unjustification of losses, as was the case in October-November 1943 near Kiev. Read also: Mass graves of Bakhmut, about which we will learn more. The story of “White Angel” about how the city disappeared “At the political level, the research of scientists on the consequences of the war was transformed into a completely different message: “the victorious state”, “the victorious people”, we glorified the victims in dozens of museums, books, films, allegedly and everything is fine. But there was a latent dissonance between the tragedy of the war and the varnished political image of this war,” the historian explained. As for the demographic losses from forced migration, the immediate head of Gladun at the Institute of Demography, Ella Libanova, in an interview with the French website RFI, expressed hope that the return to Ukraine will be higher than the similar rate after the Balkan wars in the 1990s, when about a third returned home refugees She drew this conclusion from the fact that about 200,000 men who went to defend our country after February 24, 2022 returned to Ukraine from abroad. At the beginning of 2023, 4.6 million Ukrainians were abroad. Photo: Nataliya Kravchuk Another thing is that often there will be nowhere to return to, as certain areas will become depopulated. “For example, after the evacuation, my grandmother returned to Kyiv and lived with her two children in the front room. This lasted for half a year, until my grandfather returned from the army and the family was given a place to live. I don’t think that any mother is ready for such a thing now decision,” said Libanova. Sociologist from Warsaw Yoanna Koniechna-Salamatin also joined the discussion at the War Museum. According to her estimates, the majority of Ukrainians who came to Poland in 2022-2023 are ready to return, they mostly keep their Ukrainian identity, scattered in many, including prestigious, professions. “However, of course, there are those who will not return, this new wave very naturally entered into the previous one, economic migration, and accordingly was adopted quite quickly. A lot depends on how things will go in Ukraine itself,” concluded Yoanna. Read also: More than a third of migrants from Ukraine plan to stay in EU countries – survey

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