Ukraine Is Becoming A Nation Of Widows & Orphans - CNN (

 Ukraine Is Becoming A Nation Of Widows & Orphans - CNN (Photos)

🇺🇦 Olena Bilozerska and her husband always knew they wanted children. She was 34 and they were ready to start trying when the war erupted in eastern Ukraine in 2014.

The couple joined the fight and decided a baby would have to wait. By the time Bilozerska left the military, she was 41 and told by doctors her chances of conceiving were next to none. It was too late.

With the war in Ukraine about to mark its fourth anniversary, Ukraine’s birth rate is collapsing, with increasing number of people struggling with fertility or putting off the decision to have children. At the same time, losses are mounting on the frontlines, and millions of people who have fled as refugees have now settled abroad. The result is one of the world’s worst demographic crises.

“It’s a catastrophe,” Ella Libanova, a leading Ukrainian demographer, told CNN. “No country can exist without people. Even before the war, Ukraine’s population density was low (and) very unevenly spread.”

Libanova said Ukraine has lost around 10 million people since the start of the war – between those who have been killed, left the country or are living in areas under Russian occupation. And while the country’s birthrate has been declining for years – a common trend across Europe – it has now all but collapsed.

Russia’s aggression has forced millions of Ukrainians to put their lives on hold. But for many women, this decision can come at a huge cost.

When she came back from the frontlines, Bilozerska was told that her chance of having her own baby was at best 5%. “The doctors advised me not to waste time and take a donor egg right away,” she said. Not keen on that idea, she started fertility treatment – even though the odds were stacked heavily against her.

“Soldiers live one day at a time. They live to see the evening, to see the next day. They have urgent needs – where to get money for drones, for car repairs. They do not plan anything for the future,” Bilozerska told CNN in Kyiv.

“I consider it my moral duty to tell (military) women that if they want children in the future, I would advise them to get checked and freeze their eggs. I share my story so that fewer women end up in such a predicament.”

To maximize the odds of an in vitro fertilization (IVF) procedure being successful, doctors usually try to retrieve between 10 and 15 eggs in each cycle. In Bilozerska’s case, they managed to get just one, warning her right away that the chances of it being healthy were small. After fertilizing it with her husband’s sperm, they once again cautioned her: The risks of it not working out were high.

The next few days were torture, with the couple waiting to see if the embryo would survive. When it did, Bilozerska, then 42, was ready to take her only chance at having a baby.

That’s when Russia launched its full-scale invasion of Ukraine. As a fully-trained military officer, Bilozerska was immediately needed back at the front. The embryo stayed in Kyiv, frozen and stored in a cryobank with roughly 10,000 others.

“I went back to war, and I was so afraid that the clinic would be bombed, I called the clinic, I asked what would happen, whether the cryobank would be taken abroad, whether it was safe,” Bilozerska told CNN. She was reassured that the clinic had a reinforced wall protecting the embryos. It wouldn’t withstand a direct hit, but it would protect them from shrapnel and debris.

Ukraine does not release its casualty data, but a report published in January by the Center for Strategic and International Studies, a US-based think tank, estimated that between 100,000 and 140,000 Ukrainians have been killed since the start of the full-scale invasion four years ago.

The country’s relatively high draft age and the exemption of the youngest draftees from the front lines means the average age of a Ukrainian soldier is about 43 years, significantly older than in many western countries.

Because of that, most of the men and women who are losing their lives on the front lines are married with children – and Ukraine is becoming a country of widows and orphans. Official statistics show there are now 59,000 children living without their biological parents in Ukraine, most of them in foster families.