Ukraine's Population Is 37.29 Million, Cabinet Says

The estimate did not take into account the population of occupied territories.

Ukrainian Cabinet of Ministers Minister Dmytro Dubilet presented the results of the work to estimate Ukraine's population in a Telegram channel.

Ukraine's population as of December 1, 2019 was 37.29 million people. Gender breakdown: 20.01 million women and 17.28 million men. Kyiv has 3.7 million people.

Dmytro Dubilet made several clarifications about the population estimate.

The estimate was carried out over three months of intense work. For the state, this work did not cost any additional money. A population census would have cost 3.4 billion hryvnias (the budget set for 2020), and the census results would have been obtained in the first quarter of 2021.

Three methods were used to make the estimate, which produced roughly similar results with a difference of 2.86%:

1. Combined method (mobile operators + social surveys + registries). Under an agreement with mobile operators, the project team received anonymous information on the total number of subscribers in the territory. After that, a large-scale sociological survey was conducted, which established how many mobile subscribers fall into each age group in each district. The information obtained was then supplemented with registries of young and elderly Ukrainians.
2. Combined method (pension fund data + extrapolation through the gender-age structure). The number of pensioners was taken from pension fund data. These data were then extrapolated through the gender-age structure. Sociologists called the chart a "Christmas tree", which contains data from two sources at once: the State Statistics Service and state registries.
3. Registry method. Anonymized data were taken from the state register of individuals (including those who refused a tax identification number). The database was then cleaned by criteria of receiving any income, pensions, social payments, or subsidies, and was supplemented with records of passport issuance for travel abroad. After that, birth/death rates as well as emigration and immigration were taken into account.

The estimate provided information only on the size, gender-age structure of the population, and its distribution across regions. A population census provides these same data, as well as some others (for example, on ethnicity or household composition).

The estimate did not take into account the population of occupied territories. The project team provided an estimate only of the population of the territory of Ukraine under the control of Ukrainian authorities. "This, of course, does not mean that we have forgotten about our citizens who remained in these territories," Dubilet added.