Kyiv
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Olena Bilozerska and her husband all the time knew they wished youngsters. She was 34 and they had been prepared to start out making an attempt when the warfare erupted in japanese Ukraine in 2014. The couple joined the struggle and determined a child must wait. By the time Bilozerska left the army, she was 41 and instructed by docs her probabilities of conceiving had been subsequent to none. It was too late.
As the warfare in Ukraine enters its fourth 12 months, Ukraine’s start charge is collapsing, with growing quantity of individuals battling fertility or laying aside the resolution to have youngsters. At the similar time, losses are mounting on the frontlines, and hundreds of thousands of individuals who have fled as refugees have now settled overseas. The end result is one of the world’s worst demographic crisis.
“It’s a catastrophe,” Ella Libanova, a main Ukrainian demographer, instructed NCS. “No country can exist without people. Even before the war, Ukraine’s population density was low (and) very unevenly spread.”
Libanova stated Ukraine has misplaced round 10 million individuals since the begin of the warfare – between those that have been killed, left the nation or reside in areas beneath Russian occupation. And whereas the nation’s birthrate has been declining for years – a frequent development throughout Europe – it has now all however collapsed.
Russia’s unprovoked aggression has pressured hundreds of thousands of Ukrainians to place their lives on maintain. But for a lot of girls, this resolution can come at a big value.
When she got here again from the frontlines, Bilozerska was instructed that her probability of having her personal child was at finest 5%. “The doctors advised me not to waste time and take a donor egg right away,” she stated. Not eager on that concept, she began fertility therapy – although the odds had been stacked closely towards 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 instructed NCS 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) process being profitable, docs normally attempt to retrieve between 10 and 15 eggs in every cycle. In Bilozerska’s case, they managed to get only one, warning her straight away that the probabilities of it being wholesome had been small. After fertilizing it together with her husband’s sperm, they as soon as once more cautioned her: The dangers of it not figuring out had been excessive.
The subsequent few days had been torture, with the couple ready to see if the embryo would survive. When it did, Bilozerska, then 42, was able to take her solely probability at having a child.
That’s when Russia launched its full-scale invasion of Ukraine. As a fully-trained army officer, Bilozerska was instantly wanted again at the entrance. The embryo stayed in Kyiv, frozen and saved 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 instructed NCS. She was reassured that the clinic had a bolstered wall defending the embryos. It wouldn’t face up to a direct hit, however it would shield them from shrapnel and particles.
Dr. Valery Zukin is one of the pioneers of reproductive drugs in Ukraine and the director of the clinic the place Bilozerska’s embryo was saved. The clinic is referred to as Nadiya, that means Hope in Ukrainian.
He instructed NCS the warfare is having devastating affect on Ukraine’s fertility charges. “I can see it with my own eyes. We are seeing more complications, more abnormalities, more difficulties carrying pregnancy to term,” he stated, explaining that routine genetic testing on miscarried embryos has revealed that the incidence of chromosomal abnormalities has grown sharply since the begin of the warfare.
Dr. Alla Baranenko, a reproductive specialist at the Nadiya clinic, stated she is additionally seeing extra instances of untimely menopause in youthful girls.
“The quality of eggs is poorer and their number is decreasing – and it’s because of stress and it’s not just my patients, it’s also the egg donors, who are women without any reproductive problems. And yet the quality of their eggs is poorer,” she stated, including that the high quality of sperm of Ukrainian males, particularly these getting back from the entrance, is additionally worse.
“We have been preserving sperm for 30 years. When we compare the quality of the sperm of military personnel now with that of ordinary men before the war, it is, of course, worse. Stress also affects men, but it’s not just stress, it’s also the conditions they live in.”
Iryna Ivanova had all the telltale indicators of early being pregnant. But she didn’t need to inform her husband till she knew for certain. He was very enthusiastic about the chance of having youngsters, and Ivanova didn’t need to get his hopes up in case it was a false alarm.
By the time she was sure she was carrying a youngster, it was too late to inform him. Pavlo Ivanov, her husband, the love of her life, and one of Ukraine’s elite F-16 pilots, was killed in motion on April 12 2025.
When her daughter was born in December, Ivanova referred to as her Yustyna – the identify the couple picked collectively when fantasizing about having youngsters. Yustyna has Pavlo’s mild blue eyes and appears to have taken after him in her calmness.
“When I heard her cry, that first moment, it was as if I began to breathe,” Ivanova instructed NCS, tears streaming down her face. “You can feel the greatest joy and the greatest pain, and you just get used to it being part of you and your life now.”
Ukraine doesn’t launch its casualty knowledge, however a report published in January by the Center for Strategic and International Studies, a US-based suppose tank, estimated that between 100,000 and 140,000 Ukrainians have been killed since the begin of the full-scale invasion 4 years in the past.
The nation’s comparatively excessive draft age and the exemption of the youngest draftees from the frontlines means the common age of a Ukrainian soldier is about 43 years, considerably older than in lots of western nations.
Because of that, most of the males and girls who’re shedding their lives on the entrance strains are married with youngsters – and Ukraine is becoming a nation of widows and orphans. Official statistics present there at the moment are 59,000 youngsters dwelling with out their organic dad and mom in Ukraine, most of them in foster households.
Oksana Borkun is aware of a lot about the stigma of being a younger widow. Her husband Volodymyr Hunko was killed in Bakhmut in the summer time of 2022. Having grown up in a tradition the place grief is meant to be non-public and girls with out husbands are sometimes seemed down upon, she has made it her mission to make the lives of Ukraine’s widows simpler.
Sitting in a cozy cafe in central Kyiv, Borkun and her two associates Juliia Seliutina and Olena Biletska, had been sharing tales over cups of espresso and scorching cocoa, as the cafe’s diesel generator – made mandatory by Russia’s relentless destruction of Ukraine’s power infrastructure – hummed in the background.
The three girls, all widows, had been introduced collectively by their shared grief and want to assist others in the similar scenario. Their on-line help group for widows of army males now has greater than 6,000 members, and they arrange common in-person meetups, memorial evenings and different occasions.
Borkun is the driving drive behind many of the tasks, and it was she who satisfied Biletska to become involved in a challenge that focuses on getting birthday presents for youngsters of fallen troopers.
“It so happened that (my husband) Vovchik and I didn’t have children, so I was afraid that it would be very painful for me. We wanted this child so much, but it didn’t work out … it turned out that (working on this project) helped me heal,” she stated, including that the group is now sending on common 200 presents each month.
A widow at 45, Biletska has made peace with the proven fact that she is unlikely to have her personal child. She and her husband tried for youngsters and had been in search of therapy when he went to warfare.
“The war took away the years when I could have had children,” she instructed NCS.
Iryna and Pavlo Ivanov had been so set on having tons of youngsters – positively greater than three, she instructed NCS.
Ukraine’s fertility charge, or the quantity of youngsters which can be born to a median girl over her lifetime, has now dropped to beneath one, in comparison with 1.4 throughout Europe and 1.6 in the US.
Even earlier than the warfare, it was uncommon for a younger couple like the Ivanovs to ponder having greater than two youngsters. They had been precisely the type of individuals Ukraine wanted to enhance its dire demographic crisis. But that dream died alongside together with her husband.
Seliutina stated that their motion is making an attempt to empower widowed girls to grow to be lively members of the society – one thing that she believes will grow to be particularly essential after the warfare ends and Ukraine will begin rebuilding.
Some 6 million individuals, principally younger girls and youngsters, have fled and formally registered as refugees overseas since the full-scale warfare first began in 2022. The overwhelming majority are nonetheless dwelling overseas, and Libanova stated that the longer the battle continues, the much less seemingly it is that they’ll come again.
“With each passing month, there is more and more destruction here and, on the other hand, more and more of our war migrants are adapting to their new life abroad. Fewer are returning,” she instructed NCS.
The big exodus is additionally a main mind drain for Ukraine.
“I hope that the most qualified people will return. … The economy and infrastructure will need to be rebuilt. We will need workers, and mostly skilled ones. If we don’t have enough of these people, we will have to bring in foreigners, which may not be a bad thing. But I doubt that many skilled foreigners will come here in large numbers,” she stated.
Seliutina stated this is the place warfare widows, particularly youthful ones, may help safe Ukraine’s future.
“The young women who have lost their loved ones, they know the price of loss. They know why our men went there and why they cannot leave the country now. We can’t just sit and wait for someone else to do something for us. We are no longer capable of that,” she stated.
Last 12 months, as she turned 45, Bilozerska realized she was getting previous. Not only for motherhood, but in addition for the warfare. She was serving as a sniper.
“I really couldn’t do the combat work anymore. Most of the men (in my unit) are young athletes … of course, I couldn’t keep up with them anymore,” she instructed NCS. Her commanders have lengthy been suggesting she’d take up a completely different place away from the frontlines, however she had been resisting.
When her mom died, leaving her disabled father on his personal, she knew it was time to come back again to Kyiv.
Her embryo was nonetheless in Nadiya, having waited for her for 3 years. “I felt that this was my last chance to have a child. I went to the clinic for my embryo. And that’s how Pavlus was born when I was 46,” she instructed NCS throughout a stroll in a wintery Kyiv park.
Baranenko, who handled Bilozerska at the Nadiya clinic, stated that of all the instances she has labored on, it’s her story caught together with her the most. Over her 20-year profession, she has helped to conceive 5,000 infants.
Pavlus, wrapped up heat and trying like a tiny snowman in his powder blue snowsuit, checked out her as she gently picked him up for a cuddle.
“His middle name is Bohdan, meaning ‘a gift from God,’” she stated. “You pick him up and just melt. He reaches out to you, he smiles and you just go crazy over him, it’s impossible to describe.”