Quiet streets, ghost towns: How Russia is changing Ukraine
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Howard LaFranchi Staff writer
| KHARKIV, Ukraine
Nearly three years after Russia’s full-scale invasion, the war is accelerating Ukraine’s deepening demographic crisis. With the population down by nearly a quarter during the war, eerie scenes of abandoned apartment buildings, quiet boulevards, and childless playgrounds are common across much of Ukraine. In the hardest-hit areas, many villages are ghost towns.
Demographers and political scientists debate to what degree Russia’s campaign is a war of depopulation, and what Russian President Vladimir Putin’s aims might be. But virtually all experts agree that the steep depopulation is going to cloud Ukraine’s economic prospects well into the future.
Why We Wrote This
A story focused onIs Russia’s war in Ukraine intended as a war of depopulation? Some experts say the hollowing-out of communities contributes to a national mental health crisis. Still, others look forward to a postwar process of renewal and growth.
Surveying the cleanup operation at the site of a deadly missile strike on a high-rise residential building, Kharkiv Mayor Ihor Terekhov offers a grim assessment of Russia’s objectives.
“This is state terrorism with the goal of frightening our residents and making life here unbearable,” he says, gesturing toward the rows of boarded-up windows around the site of the blast. “The Russians are killing innocent people,” he adds, “but their main goal is to empty our city of life.”
“So many families have left,” says Angelika, a resident of the building complex. “Unfortunately, what the mayor says about our enemy is right. And it’s working.”
Surveying a cleanup operation at the site of a deadly missile strike on one of Kharkiv’s high-rise residential buildings, Mayor Ihor Terekhov offers a grim assessment of Russia’s aims for such attacks.
“This is state terrorism with the goal of frightening our residents and making life here unbearable,” he says, gesturing toward the rows of boarded-up windows around the site of the blast. “The Russians are killing innocent people,” he adds, “but their main goal is to empty our city of life.”
Angelika, a resident of the housing estate in Kharkiv’s Soviet-era Saltivka suburb, who withheld her last name, agrees with the mayor. She points to a playground. There, a boy sits alone on a swing, staring blankly at the gaping wound in the building in front of him.
Why We Wrote This
A story focused onIs Russia’s war in Ukraine intended as a war of depopulation? Some experts say the hollowing-out of communities contributes to a national mental health crisis. Still, others look forward to a postwar process of renewal and growth.
“Before the war, that playground would have been full of children playing on a nice morning like this, but you see now there is one sad boy,” says Angelika. “So many families have left,” she adds. “Unfortunately, what the mayor says about our enemy is right. And it’s working.”
Nearly three years after Russia’s full-scale invasion, the war is accelerating Ukraine’s rapid depopulation, exacerbating a demographic crisis that has been deepening for three decades.
With the population down by some 8 million people – nearly a quarter – in less than three years, eerie scenes of abandoned apartment buildings, quiet boulevards, and childless playgrounds like those in Saltivka are common across much of Ukraine.
In the hardest-hit areas, many villages are ghost towns.
When Ukraine won independence in 1991 after the collapse of the Soviet Union, its population stood at 52 million. By 2014, when Russia occupied and annexed Crimea and first invaded several eastern Ukrainian provinces, that figure had fallen to 45 million.
Now, owing to the combination of widespread emigration, a plummeting birth rate, and civilian and military casualties during three years of war, Ukraine’s population has declined to 35 million, the United Nations reported late last year.
Impact on Ukraine’s economic future
Demographers and political scientists debate to what degree Russia’s campaign is a war of depopulation, and what Russian President Vladimir Putin’s aims might be in carrying out such a war.
Some say Mr. Putin wants to eliminate the threat he sees from a hostile population along Russia’s borders by emptying those areas of people and creating a kind of buffer zone – akin to what some Israeli officials say is their objective in northern Gaza.
Others say Russia, which faces its own “catastrophic” demographic crisis, to quote Mr. Putin, is conducting the 21st century’s first population-focused war in which people are war booty. To win, he’s annexing lands with millions of Russian speakers and abducting thousands of Ukrainian children to grow up as Russians.
But virtually all experts agree that the steep depopulation is going to cloud Ukraine’s economic prospects well into the future. In the shorter term, it could leave the country with no choice but to accept an otherwise unsatisfactory peace deal with Russia – one that confirms Russia’s grab of territory and citizens, but that at least halts the other factors feeding the demographic decline.
Moreover, with Ukrainian officials reporting a national mental health crisis as the devastating war drags on, many experts say the depopulation and hollowing-out of communities cannot help but be a major factor in the crisis.
“I am not an expert in psychology,” says Borys Krimer, a senior demographer at Ukraine’s Academy of Sciences in Kyiv, “but if you’re one of the few old persons in a village of empty houses and streets, or the last family in what was once a lively apartment building or neighborhood, of course it’s going to be hard to live with that.”
In Kharkiv, Ukraine’s second-largest city and a hub of Ukrainian intellectual life, the population decline is evident. The center of the country’s publishing industry and home to many universities, Kharkiv is also only about 20 miles from the Russian border, making it particularly vulnerable to random strikes on civilian infrastructure – or depopulation warfare.
“We’ve been through six or seven waves of change in the population since 2022, with large numbers of people leaving and then coming back, leaving and coming back, like a swing,” says Maxim Rosenfeld, a Kharkiv architect, historian, and urban visionary.
Noting that Kharkiv’s population plunged from over 1.5 million in early 2022 to less than 300,000 within a few months of the invasion, Dr. Rosenfeld says the return of many residents (and the city’s role as host to thousands of people who have fled their homes in the surrounding region) has indeed pushed population back up. But it has not repaired the city’s “emotional health” and morale.
“Kharkiv is not an empty city like it was in [spring] of 2022, but there is a feeling of a lack of activity,” he says. “People are resigned to the random blows that continue to hit our city. But that has left a feeling of sadness.”
An avant-garde role?
Much of Kharkiv’s architecture hints at its rivalry with St. Petersburg as a center of cosmopolitan life during the Russian Empire, while more modern buildings – like the iconic Derzhprom high-rise of the 1920s – underscore a century-old flair for the avant-garde.
Russia’s systematic targeting of Kharkiv’s architectural icons, including the Derzhprom building, is part of its campaign to dishearten and ultimately depopulate the city, says Dr. Rosenfeld, who is also known for conducting city walking tours.
Before the war, Kharkiv hosted 300,000 university students, many drawn by the city’s intellectual heartbeat. Many thousands are still here, but the wartime mood is very different, the historian says. “If you look into the faces of the young students now, you see very different faces,” he says. Lightheartedness is now absent.
Still, Dr. Rosenfeld says he is buoyed by the prospect of Kharkiv once again playing an avant-garde role, this time in Ukraine’s postwar recovery and renewal. And that includes its demographic health.
For one thing, a Ukraine that is not only at peace, but also on a path of renewal and growth, will draw back many of the 8 million Ukrainians who have fled the war, he and others say.
In Dr. Rosenfeld’s vision, Kharkiv is a “city of the frontier.” But instead of its frontier being a vast untapped new world like the American West in the 19th century, it is a frontier of the dark threats, challenges, and bright promises of the 21st century.
“In that way, what is going on in Kharkiv and what I see lying ahead is a very American story,” he says. “The risks are very high, but the possibilities are also great.” And like the American West, he predicts, this new “frontier” will be “irresistible” for many.
In this scenario, Kharkiv will be the beneficiary, not the sad victim, of its location just miles from a threatening and powerful adversary.
Mr. Rosenfeld says he draws inspiration from other international cities that learned to thrive in adverse environments – he cites Seoul, South Korea; West Berlin during the Cold War; and Tel Aviv, Israel.
“Not one of those cities can be considered a shrinking city,” he says. “Kharkiv has the elements to join that group.”
And one of those elements that gives him hope for Kharkiv’s – and the nation’s – future is the “spirit” of the people.
“That’s what made the American West, when so many thought those who went there were the craziest,” Dr. Rosenfeld says. “That spirit and belief in infinite possibilities is always part of a new frontier,” he adds. “It’s why I believe we have a frontier here.”
Oleksandr Naselenko assisted in reporting this story.
