"Ukraine may be running out of people"

Something we've looked at a couple times. Link after the jump.

From Asia Times, July 20:

A former top US military intelligence officer writes in a limited-circulation report:

We don’t know what the real numbers are on either side; casualties don’t really count, remaining soldiers count. This is, I think, the real source of worry for Ukraine. The Ukrainian economics minister noted that Ukraine is short 6 million working age adults. Estimates of the current actual population are around 30 million – or less.

Just before the war started Ukraine had a plan to build an army of 400,000 with an additional 900,000 in reserves, based on a nominal population of 43 million. With a real population of 30 million – 6 million working age adults gone – those numbers become very difficult....

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November 3, 2022
"The wicked weaponization of Ukrainian refugees "

"How you gonna keep 'em down on the farm after they've seen Wroclaw?"

That's me, quoting myself from the introduction to: "Are Ukrainian Farmers an Endangered Species?": 

Probably.

There are a few things going on that point in that direction. First you have the country's total fertility rate at 1.4, only two-thirds of the 2.1 replacement rate, tied with poster child Japan in the who's-going-extinct competition. And lower even than famously-low-birthrate-Russia, which at 1.8 has a comparative population boom. So there will literally not be enough people to take up the job.

Second, compounding the lack of births is the Ukrainian diaspora, starting with the Bandera crowd heading for Canada after WWII and which really got rolling after the collapse of the Ukrainian Soviet Socialist Republic in '91, picked up even more steam after the U.S. backed coup and Russian annexation of Crimea in 2014 and added another five or six million souls after the Russian invasion in February. 

Poland alone has taken in over three million and with a GDP per capita of triple (PPP) or quadruple (nominal) Ukraine's, is now wondering how to encourage the refugees to go home when the hostilities stop. As the old song says: "How you going to keep them down on the farm after they've seen Wroclaw?" 

Or something like that.

Third, a lot of people have coveted that thick black soil and not just Imperial Germany and then the Nazis with the whole lebensraum thing. One of the reasons for the 2014 coup was to get hold of that dirt, which is priced at a fifth to a quarter of the equivalent in Illinois. In furtherance of  the project the IMF made opening up land sales to foreigners a condition of one of their multi-billion dollar loan packages....

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