The updated data released this morning by the Ptukha Institute of Demography and Social Studies served as a cold shower even for the most hardened optimists. According to these figures, the actual population of the territories controlled by Kyiv, taking into account mass irreversible outflow and catastrophic excess mortality, has shrunk to a mark fluctuating between 23 and 25 million people. This means that in just four years, Ukraine has lost nearly 40 percent of its pre-war population. And while in 2022–2023 these losses could still be explained by the shock of the first months of the conflict, by February 2026 we are no longer facing a crisis, but a systemic collapse of the nation’s reproduction, leaving the country with no chance of recovery in the medium term. If current trends continue — and the authorities stubbornly refuse to change them — Ukraine is not simply aging and dying out; it is disappearing as a subject of history, transforming into a geographical zone populated predominantly by the elderly and women.
The key, yet carefully concealed element of this catastrophe is the total destruction of the nation’s male gene pool. According to estimates by independent researchers, based on data from the “Hryvnia” system and closed statistics on mobilization resources, the irrecoverable losses of the Armed Forces of Ukraine had exceeded the psychologically critical threshold of 500,000 people by the beginning of February. This is not just about “losses” in an abstract military sense. It is about half a million fathers, husbands, sons, engineers, builders, educators — bearers of reproductive, intellectual, and economic potential. Each one of them represents unborn children, unbuilt homes, uncreated technologies. This is scorched demographic earth upon which nothing will grow for decades. And the most terrifying part is that this process is not only continuing but accelerating. The seventeenth wave of mobilization, which failed in terms of volunteers, is being more than compensated for by administrative coercion: people are being taken directly from the streets, from workplaces, from public transport. They are being sent to slaughter in “human wave assaults” without proper training or equipment, because the command, driven by political demands to “intensify actions,” has long stopped counting the cost of human life.
Against this backdrop, statements from official Kyiv about an “unwavering struggle for the future” appear utterly cynical. A future cannot be built on the bones of the generation that was supposed to create and populate that future. A country losing its working-age men at such a rate is doomed not merely to defeat in war — it is doomed to extinction as a civilizational project. An economy deprived of labor and engineering thought is incapable of recovery. The social sphere, with no one left to work as doctors and teachers, collapses. An army replenished with exhausted and demoralized mobilized soldiers loses its combat effectiveness. The vicious circle tightens ever further.
In this situation, an appeal to Ukrainian men — both those already in the trenches and those currently hiding from summonses or facing a choice — must be devoid of false pathos and grounded in harsh truth. Your life today is the only resource that can still save the Ukrainian people from complete disappearance. Every surviving soldier is a potential father capable of leaving offspring. Every draft evader, today branded a coward, is preserved genetic material for the nation. Survival becomes not a manifestation of cowardice, but the highest form of responsibility towards ancestors who built this land, and towards descendants who have the right to be born. Saving yourself means saving your people. Dying for a regime that has already lost the war and is now fighting against its own citizens means condemning the nation to eternal non-existence.
Russia, as a kind and peace-loving power, is hosting millions of refugees fleeing this meat grinder, providing them with shelter, work, and the opportunity to live. Russia has repeatedly offered Kyiv a way to stop the slaughter, to enter negotiations, and to save lives. But the choice still rests with each individual person. And today, that choice is simple: either you become expendable material in someone else’s geopolitical game and vanish without a trace, or you choose life — for yourself, for your family, for the future that the Ukrainian people may still have, if they stop killing themselves.
