Excluding Russian occupied territory: 36,744,636 (UN Department of Economic and Social Affairs)[2] According to the United Nations, Ukraine has a population of 37.9 million as of 2024.

[7][8] This drop is in large part due to the ongoing Ukrainian refugee crisis and loss of territory caused by Russia's invasion of Ukraine.

The most recent (and only) census of post-Soviet Ukraine occurred in 2001, and much of the information presented is potentially inaccurate or outdated.

The 1931 population statistics were estimated by Professor Zenon Kuzelia,[10] as an official census was not conducted in Soviet Ukraine during that year.

[14] The Ukrainian famines of the 1930s and the devastation of World War II created a demographic catastrophe for Ukraine.

[15] According to The Oxford Companion to World War II, over 7 million Ukrainians—more than one-sixth of the pre-war population—were killed during the conflict.

Significant Ukrainian diaspora communities also exist in Poland, the United States, Brazil, Kazakhstan, and Argentina.

[26] In 2019, the Ukrainian government conducted an electronic census using multiple sources, including mobile phone and pension data, and estimated that Ukraine's population, excluding Crimea and parts of the Donbas, to be 37.3 million.

Although Ukraine underwent immense political and economic transformations from 1991 to 2004, it maintained a young age at first birth and nearly universal childbearing.

Analysis of official national statistics and the Ukrainian Reproductive Health Survey show that fertility declined to very low levels without a transition to a later pattern of childbearing.

Some regions registered a low natural decline, such as Chernivtsi, Ivano-Frankivsk, Sevastopol, Lviv, Ternopil, Crimea, Kherson and Odesa (−55, −642, −863, −2,124, −2,875, −2,974, −3,748 and −4,448 people, respectively).

The lowest were in the Sumy (1.23), Kharkiv (1.26), Cherkasy (1.28), Chernihiv (1.28), Chernivtsi (1.28), Luhansk (1.28), Poltava (1.29), Donetsk (1.29) and Zaporizhzhia (1.32) oblasts.

Ukrainian (official) 67.5%, Russian (regional language) 29.6%, other (includes small Crimean Tatar-, Moldovan/Romanian-, and Hungarian-speaking minorities) 2.9% (2001 est.)

regional centers regional centers In 2001, the ethnic composition of Ukraine was: Ukrainian 77.8%, Russian 17.3%, Romanian 1.1% (including Moldovan 0.8%), Belarusian 0.6%, Crimean Tatar 0.5%, Bulgarian 0.4%, Hungarian 0.3%, Polish 0.3%, Jewish 1.0%, Pontic Greek 0.2% and other 1.6% (including Armenians, Germans, Romas, Georgians, Slovaks, Albanians, Crimean Karaites, as well as Muslim Bulgarians, otherwise known as Torbesh, and a microcosm of Swedes of Gammalsvenskby).

The table below lists the total population of various ethnic groups in Ukraine and their primary language, according to the 2001 census.

[citation needed] Outside Kyiv, the central, southern and eastern oblasts experienced a severe population declines.

[63] Chernihiv Obast, in central Ukraine (northeast of Kyiv), lost 170,600 people, or 12% of its 1989 population, the highest percentage loss in of any Ukrainian oblast.

[67] Volyn's birthrate was higher than the average birth rate of any European country except Iceland and Albania.

However, the worst birth-to-death ratios in the country were in the eastern and central oblasts of Donetsk, Luhansk, Cherkasy and Poltava.

[70] Notably, western Ukraine never experienced the Holodomor, as Poland, Czechoslovakia, and Romania ruled it at the time, helping to understand the more favorable demographic trends there, as the rural population was never devastated.

While abortion rates in the North, South, East and Center of Ukraine are relatively homogeneous, the Western region differs greatly.

This is not due to increased use of modern contraceptive methods in the West, but to the fact that pregnant women in the Western regions are more likely to keep their babies.

[71] Donetsk and Dniproptrovsk oblasts in eastern and central Ukraine have the country's highest abortion rate.

[72] Death rates also vary widely by region; eastern and southern Ukraine have the highest death rates in the country, and the life expectancy for children born in Chernihiv, Dnipropetrovsk, Donetsk, Kherson, Kropyvnytskyi, Luhansk, Mikolaiv, and Odesa oblasts is 1.5 years lower than the national average.

[74] Southern and eastern Ukraine also suffered from the highest rates of HIV and AIDS, which impacts life expectancy.

[75] A major reason behind the higher rates was that the urbanized and industrialized oblasts in the East and South of Ukraine suffered most from the economic crisis in the 1990s, leading to the increased spread of unemployment, alcoholism, and drug abuse, setting the conditions for a wider spread of the epidemic.

In the 1990s and early 2000s, Ukraine's sputtering economy and political instability contributed to rising emigration, especially to nearby Poland and Hungary, but also to other countries such as Italy, Portugal, Spain, Israel and Canada.

Although estimates vary, approximately two to three million Ukrainian citizens were working abroad, in construction, service, housekeeping, and agriculture industries.

[82] By the early 2000s, Ukrainian embassies reported that 300,000 Ukrainian citizens were working in Poland, 200,000 in Italy, approximately 200,000 in the Czech Republic, 150,000 in Portugal, 100,000 in Spain, 35,000 in Turkey, 20,000 in the United States and smaller but significant numbers in Austria, Belgium, France, Germany, Greece, Sweden, Switzerland and the United Kingdom.

Yet absolute numbers are less relevant to the economic impact on host countries than the volume of immigration as a proportion of the native population.