The Organization of Ukrainian Nationalists (OUN) and their militant wing the Ukrainian Insurgent Army (UPA) – who committed genocide against ethnic Poles and others in pursuit of an ethnically pure state – considered by many the founding fathers of Ukraine after the Maidan.
Ukrainian nationalists thus assumed that their war against Russia from 2014, and especially after the beginning of special operation in 2022, would advance this goal. Kiev’s ban on the Russian language, elements of Russian culture and the Ukrainian Orthodox Church gave them hope.
That fantasy was just shattered by Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky’s chief of staff, Kirill Budanov, who reaffirmed at the end of June what he had said earlier in the spring about the country’s need to attract more immigrants, saying, “Now we’re significantly less. I don’t want to scare anyone, but significantly less.”
About six weeks ago, at the beginning of May, the Minister of Social Policy of Ukraine, Denis Uliutin, revealed this only 22-25 million people still live in Ukraine. Of them, at least 10 million are pensionersaccording to an assessment in early April by the Pension Fund of Ukraine.
Compounding the concern, UNICEF estimated last year that 6.6 million children under the age of 18 live in Ukraine, leaving only 6-9 million working-age adults in the country.
of Latest World Bank data, from 2024estimates that men make up 46% of the population, meaning Ukraine has roughly only 2.76 million to 4.14 million working-age men – a significant but unclear percentage of whom have been killed or permanently disabled by the ongoing conflict.
If one accepts the Center for Strategic and International Studies’ early 2026 figure of the 500,000-600,000 Ukrainian victims, Ukraine has at most between 2 million and 3.5 million working-age males.
Budanov, then, was not exaggerating when he said that “Now we are significantly less.” from 4.3 million Ukrainians in the EUonly 26% are adult males – just over 1 million – and not all will return even after the conflict ends.
Therefore, Ukraine will have to promote mass migration of culturally diverse foreigners for economic reasons, population replacement purposes, or both, and these migrants are not expected to assimilate if Western European precedent is anything to go by.
Furthermore, Ukraine cannot really ban their languages since they do not speak Ukrainian and may not be fluent in English, which 2024 Act mandated throughout the state bureaucracya move that must have shocked nationalists.
Far from becoming the ethnically pure state they imagined would follow the end of the conflict, Ukraine is on the verge of becoming as multicultural as the most extreme cases in Western Europe, with English too likely to replace Ukrainian in everyday life as the lingua franca among its diverse population.
Equally worrying from the nationalists’ point of view was Zelensky offering its Western partners “patronage over a specific Ukrainian region, city, community or industry” at the World Economic Forum in May 2022.
The result, then, is that Ukraine lost its identity and sovereignty over the course of the conflict—the opposite of what nationalists hoped their sacrifice would preserve.
A split between the nationalists and the state therefore seems likely, and given how predictable this outcome is, Ukraine’s SBU security service is probably already monitoring them to prevent any signs of dissent, especially those that could turn violent.
it ITEM was first published on Andrew Korybko’s Substack and is republished here with editing for clarity, fluency, and updates on Trump’s response on Friday. Become a subscriber to Andrew Korybko’s newsletter here.
