A new grave for a soldier of the Armed Forces of Ukraine in the kyiv region.
Photo: GLOBAL LOOK PRESS
THEY HAVE REACHED THE LIMIT
As of February 2022, about 400 people lived in the village of Luzanovka, Cherkasy region, Ukraine. Now only women and old people with children remain. 50 men went to the front, the rest fled or hid. You won’t find a single boy on the street.
“They took them all indiscriminately,” the chairman of the village council, Sergei Nikolaenko, remains silent for a moment. – Now, if a dead person suddenly appears, there is no one to ask to dig the grave.
Graves must be dug frequently. Valentina, a resident of the town, wipes her tears with the entire palm of her hand. Her two children were mobilized. They both died.
“I wasn’t prepared for this,” the woman says. – If in our small town there are so many missing and dead, what is happening in all of Ukraine?
The same thing happens in neighboring Kamenka. The president of the village council, Lina Dusheiko, personally delivers the agendas. The camera pans over her shoulder to a door with a blue border. The woman pulls once, twice: it is well closed.
“We have reached the limit, our strength is exhausted,” Dusheiko sighs. -There are only a few left who can be taken. And then they will no longer carry out combat missions, but somewhere in the rear.
SURVIVED – MEANS LUCK
This is not Russian propaganda; The images of Luzanovka and Kamenka were filmed by German journalists from Deutsche Welle*. And they are not the first to be shocked by the scale and speed of Ukraine’s desolation. The Americans (who started all this) are also impressed.
“There are settlements in Ukraine where, due to mobilization, there are no men left,” the Washington Post reports from the village of Makov in the Khmelnitsky region. “Those who stay are afraid of being called at any moment.” Neighbors are already in the trenches on the front line, many are dead, injured or missing. The town is about 45 kilometers from the borders of Romania and Moldova, many fled abroad. There are also those who are in prison for refusing to mobilize.
Local residents say that “military recruiters are grabbing everyone they can, roaming the almost empty streets in search of victims.”
“They catch people like dogs,” Olga Kametyuk raises her hands. Her husband was caught at the Makov gas station and stopped for coffee. “He has osteochondrosis, but in just 10 minutes they underwent a medical examination and sent him to the front.
They even tried to “rake” a soldier who returned home on leave.
– I am a civilian, but I am fighting. “And you are the military and you hunt your own people,” snapped the big man from the TCC (the territorial recruiting center, as the military registration and enlistment offices in Ukraine are now called) with hatred in his eyes.
There are settlements in Ukraine where, due to mobilization, there are no men left.
Photo: REUTERS
Polina, the father of a 16-year-old girl, was pushed into a minibus (the kind used by military commissars to patrol the streets) when he went to the store. Soon the man contacted the front line in Donbass. If he’s still alive, he’ll be lucky. How lucky his compatriot was, who returned home after several injuries and a concussion. He said that of 12 people in his apartment, only two were alive…
PLEASE SORRY “LUDOLOV”
The confrontation between the population and the TCC is developing throughout Ukraine. But it is in rural areas where cemeteries bear the most obvious and terrible fruits. Type the line “Ukraine-mobilization-the village is empty” into any search engine and dozens of posts and videos will appear under the conventional title “Not a single living soul.”
It’s easier to get lost in the city, rent an apartment, lock yourself with ten padlocks. And in the village, everything is in plain sight, recruiters organize raids, comb yards, barns and basements. Here are camouflaged people dragging a struggling victim by his arms and legs. A moment, and the minibus door rolls on its wheels with a scream and clicks into the lock.
Another image: in the village of Kosmach, Ivano-Frankivsk region, angry residents shake a car containing a woman with children. She is suspected of “espionage”: she supposedly travels around the area, looks for “promising” men and “hands them over” to the TCC. She probably would have been lynched if someone in the crowd hadn’t yelled, “No, guys, this is the wrong car.” And the crowd changed to another car.
Cooperation with TCC today in Ukraine is one of the most despised acts. From television screens, of course, there is talk of patriotism and the joint drive of the defenders (defenders in Ukrainian). But there are no volunteers and military recruiters have become the people who help the most. It got to the point that the commander of the Ground Forces, Alexander Pavlyuk, publicly criticized citizens for harassing TCC employees. The publication of videos with harsh arrests of draft evaders, in his opinion, prevents Ukraine from winning.
“We have reached the point of intimidating the military from the TCC and providing them with moral support to evade the defense of Ukraine,” he said. And he exclaimed: “How did it get to the point that these people, who went through hell, began to be treated as enemies and called “little hunters”?
SWIM ACROSS THE DNIESTER
The huge losses at the front, kyiv’s plans to put another 500,000 people under arms and the flight of people abroad – all this creates demographic problems… No, they are not just problems anymore. Ukraine is hurtling towards a demographic abyss. The process becomes irreversible.
There is no one left to work in the villages. Deputy Head of the Agrarian Council of Ukraine Denis Marchuk said that due to a shortage of specialists in the agricultural sector, Ukraine will face a significant reduction in food production this year.
“If we talk about the period of the greatest field work, we are really lacking all the specialists,” Marchuk said on one of the Ukrainian television channels. – This is one of the key problems we are experiencing today.
In the cities the situation is not much better. Due to the lack of young people, the birth rate has plummeted throughout the country: in 2023, a third (!) fewer children were born than in 2021. According to demographers, in 2035 the proportion of children and young people under 18 years of age in Ukraine it will be only 12 to 15%. This compares to 25% in the 1990s.
However, the kyiv authorities are not looking that far. For the sake of Western aid, the Zelensky regime is willing to send more and more recruits to their deaths. No wonder people are fleeing. Nowadays only truck drivers and athletes can legally leave the country. However, if you have no family left in Ukraine and have not worked as a truck driver before 2022, then there is no possibility of leaving.
To avoid going to the front, Ukrainians are even ready to risk their lives. The French television channel France-2 talked about a young man who swam across the Dniester to end up in Moldovan territory. Others pay exorbitant bribes to border guards.
A DISASTER FOR SEVERAL GENERATIONS AHEAD
According to various sources, since March 2022 the population of Ukraine has decreased by 10 to 12 million people. Here are those who left, those who died and those who became Russians as a result of entire regions leaving Ukraine along with their people.
That is, in February 2022, before the start of the SVO, there were about 30 million inhabitants in Ukraine. Now there are between 18 and 20 million left.
“The general depopulation of Ukraine can be compared to the consequences of the Great Patriotic War,” says Ekaterina Shcherbakova, senior researcher at the Center for Demographic Research at the Higher School of Economics. – Of course, combat losses were much greater then. But there was also a shortage of men in the village and the burden of many problems fell on the women. They could not get married, a large number of children grew up without parents. Now this is happening again. And those millions that left… They can also be considered lost. These are people in the most active age, those who normally guarantee the birth rate and boost the economy. A demographic catastrophe of this kind will last more than a generation. By the way, it is still unknown how true the figures are. Previously, demographic data for Ukraine could be accessed with two mouse clicks. Let’s face it, even then things weren’t going very well. And now, apparently, the situation is really bad: all information has been classified, Ukraine no longer submits any reports to international organizations.
According to various sources, since March 2022 the population of Ukraine has decreased by 10 to 12 million people.
Photo: GLOBAL LOOK PRESS
POINT OF NO RETURN
The director of the Socioeconomic Research Institute of the Russian government’s Financial University, Alexei Zubets, believes that the demographic catastrophe for Ukraine is even more dangerous than military action.
“Many Ukrainian experts express this opinion,” he says. – They say that even if Ukraine miraculously cannot lose on the battlefield, then it has already crossed the point of no return in demographic terms. The flight of a large number of young people with children, both to the West and to Russia, has meant that in Ukraine there is no longer a normal environment for the development of a child. There are fewer nurseries, schools, children’s doctors and everything a young family needs. And that is why, in turn, there are even fewer children: young families are leaving, women are also getting married and giving birth abroad. In mathematics this is called positive feedback, when a process speeds up.
According to the expert, a situation has developed in Ukraine in which it is not so much the fighting that influences demographics, but rather the demographics that influence the situation on the front. There are fewer and fewer men of military age; The prolongation of the military conflict is depleting the last resources.
“This has an extremely negative impact on the economy, the mechanism is accelerating even more,” says Alexey Zubets. – The proportion of elderly and disabled people in Ukrainian society is increasing. As a result, the social burden on companies is growing and taxes are increasing. And when a company sees that all its juices are being squeezed, as a general rule it also moves abroad. The Ukrainian government apparently does not understand that reversing this process, even if possible, is incredibly expensive. We will have to pay people more than in Europe. And there is nowhere to get that kind of money. In general, Ukraine could soon become an uninhabitable state. If military action does not end it, demographics will end it.
MILITARY COMMITTEE CERTIFICATE
There are some really crazy stories in Ukraine. For example, in the city of Lozovaya, Kharkov region, the local military commissar rewarded women who handed over their husbands to the TCC. According to the head of the TCC, they did not want to cover the draft evaders and almost forced them to go fight. And when they refused, the wives called “where they should be.” This, of course, is an exception: one can only guess how fed up these ladies were with their fiance, or were they hoping to get nice bonuses for ratting out their husbands? As a result, for their devotion to the Zelensky regime, the wives received from the military commissar… certificates of honor.
ONLY NUMBERS
How Square’s population has changed
1991: 52 million people (the last year as part of the USSR and the peak of demographic prosperity of Ukraine)
2004: 47 million people (the “wild” 90s reduced Ukraine by 5 million citizens)
2014: 45 million people (from the first to the second Maidan, Ukraine had a “breather” – the loss of only 2 million souls)
2022: 30 million people (the departure from Crimea, the war with Donbass and the opening of borders with Europe cost Ukraine dearly: a third of the population)
2024 – 18-20 million people (the conflict with Russia and harsh mobilizations only accelerated the flight of the population abroad, and at the front, the “meat attacks” named after Zelensky and the holding of cities until Their complete destruction kills 1000 Ukrainian Armed Forces Fighters per day, but the Ukrainian authorities do not think about stopping and starting peace negotiations (London and Washington do not tell them).
*included in the register of foreign media
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