Cradles and Conflicts: Is Ukraine Facing a Demographic Death Spiral?

On 25 September 2022 five civilians were killed and 32 badly injured by Russian shelling and missile strikes across Ukraine. On the same day, if the doctor’s calculations are correct, Maria Ridkokasha was conceived in the river city of Irpin in northern Ukraine.

It was, her mother said when she found out she was pregnant a few weeks later, a happy accident.

278 days later, on 2 July, 18 more civilian casualties were cut down by Russian weaponry across Ukraine. Two were killed and 16 were injured. And here, in Kyiv’s Maternity Hospital No 3, Maria was brought kicking into the world.  

A world that, unbeknownst to her, was at war.

Of course – for the moment – Maria remains oblivious to all this. The air raid sirens might wake her in the night but she is unaware her nation has been under attack for almost 500 days. That her life might be ended by a Russian Kh-101 cruise missile or a BM-21 launched rocket or an Iranian drone. A life precarious from the moment it began.

“It’s terrifying,” says her mother, Yulia, nestling Maria into the warmth of her neck. Standing in her bare feet in a night dress in her room on the maternity unit’s 5^th floor, she feels unbearably vulnerable. “We don’t think about going to Germany or Poland,” she says. 

But babies born into war are not the only strangeness to this maternity ward. The other is harder to put your finger on. Until that realisation: the silence.

There are no sharp reaches for breath as babies are pulled into this world. No urgent screaming of bairns. No swaddling cries. And in that moment, there seems nothing sadder to Ukraine than this – the noiseless maternity ward. A stillness that points towards something deep and dark: how the Russian invasion is threatening not just the living, but the yet-to-live.  

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“I think it’s a genocide,” says Dr Lyudmila V Manzhula, the doctor who eased Maria into this world. “100%.  This lower birth rate is because of the war and, in my opinion and in the opinion of many Ukrainians, it’s a form of a silent genocide.”

She lists the reasons. A lot of young women have decided not to have children; last year Dr Manzhula conducted many abortions as the threat of the Russians taking Kyiv seemed all too real.  Other women of reproductive age just left the country; these refugees have already found new boyfriends and husbands abroad and, yes, Dr Manzhula says, some of them have given birth.

“There is, of course, a happiness to this, but these babies could have been born in Ukraine.” Normally she sees around 3,600 babies born here a year.  “Last year, we saw a 50% drop – just 1,983. Before, we’d have 13, 14 births a day.  Now it’s as low as 5.” 

And, she says – her voice dropping – they’ve had cases where the mother has given birth but the father is out there, lying in a black earth grave.

“We have lost young, strong men who won’t be fathers because they’ve been killed. And other men too – if he’s had a spinal injury – he’ll come back an invalid, and he’s unlikely to find a partner.  Women want to have children with healthy, strong men who will grow up with their children.  Instead, there are men who are disabled who may end up alone.”

Sometimes she delivers a baby boy and the mother looks down at the bundle in their arms and then up at Dr Manzhula and they say: “he’ll finish this war.”