Chernobyl disasterScientists trawling the Pryp'yat River, near Chernobyl nuclear power plant.© Petr Pavlicek/IAEA
Chernobyl disasterThe town of Pryp'yat, Ukraine, which was evacuated after the Chernobyl accident in 1986.©Alessandro Lucca/Dreamstime.com
The 1986 Chernobyl nuclear power plant" class="md-crosslink">accident at the Chernobyl nuclear power plant created severe environmental problems in northwestern Ukraine. Vast areas of land are contaminated by dangerous short- and long-lived radioactive isotopes, notably strontium-90, which can replace calcium in foods and become concentrated in bones and teeth. Contaminated agricultural lands near Chernobyl will be unsafe for thousands of years, though some of these areas continue to be occupied and farmed. Several thousand premature deaths from cancer are expected over the long term.
People
Ethnic groups
When Ukraine was a part of the Soviet Union, a policy of Russian in-migration and Ukrainian out-migration was in effect, and ethnic Ukrainians’ share of the population in Ukraine declined from 77 percent in 1959 to 73 percent in 1991. But that trend reversed after the country gained independence, and, by the turn of the 21st century, ethnic Ukrainians made up more than three-fourths of the population. Russians continue to be the largest minority, though they now constitute less than one-fifth of the population. The remainder of the population includes Belarusians, Moldovans, Bulgarians, Poles, Hungarians, Romanians, Roma (Gypsies), and other groups. The Crimean Tatars, who were forcibly deported to Uzbekistan and other Central Asian republics in 1944, began returning to the Crimea in large numbers in 1989; by the early 21st century they constituted one of the largest non-Russian minority groups. In March 2014 Russia forcibly annexed Crimea, a move that was condemned by the international community, and human rights groups subsequently documented a series of repressive measures that had been taken against the Crimean Tatars by Russian authorities.
Ukraine: Ethnic compositionEncyclopædia Britannica, Inc.
Historically, Ukraine had large Jewish and Polish populations, particularly in the Right Bank region (west of the Dnieper River). In fact, in the late 19th century slightly more than one-fourth of the world’s Jewish population (estimated at 10 million) lived in ethnic Ukrainian territory. This predominantly Yiddish-speaking population was greatly reduced by emigration in the late 19th and early 20th centuries and by the devastation of the Holocaust. In the late 1980s and early ’90s, large numbers of Ukraine’s remaining Jews emigrated, mainly to Israel. At the turn of the 21st century, the several hundred thousand Jews left in Ukraine made up less than 1 percent of the Ukrainian population. Most of Ukraine’s large Polish minority was resettled in Poland after World War II as part of a Soviet plan to have ethnic settlement match territorial boundaries. Fewer than 150,000 ethnic Poles remained in Ukraine at the turn of the 21st century.
Languages
The vast majority of people in Ukraine speak Ukrainian, which is written with a form of the Cyrillic alphabet. The language—belonging with Russian and Belarusian to the East Slavic branch of the Slavic language family—is closely related to Russian but also has distinct similarities to the Polish language. Significant numbers of people in the country speak Polish, Yiddish, Rusyn, Belarusian, Romanian or Moldovan, Bulgarian, Crimean Turkish, or Hungarian. Russian is the most important minority language.
During the rule of imperial Russia and under the Soviet Union, Russian was the common language of government administration and public life in Ukraine. Although Ukrainian had been afforded equal status with Russian in the decade following the revolution of 1917, by the 1930s a concerted attempt at Russification was well under way. In 1989 Ukrainian once again became the country’s official language, and its status as the sole official language was confirmed in the 1996 Ukrainian constitution.
In 2012 a law was passed that granted local authorities the power to confer official status upon minority languages. Although Ukrainian was reaffirmed as the country’s official language, regional administrators could elect to conduct official business in the prevailing language of the area. In Crimea, which has an autonomous status within Ukraine and where there is a Russian-speaking majority, Russian and Crimean Tatar are the official languages. In addition, primary and secondary schools using Russian as the language of instruction still prevail in the Donets Basin and other areas with large Russian minorities. The Ukrainian parliament moved to rescind the minority language law in February 2014, after the ouster of pro-Russian Pres. Viktor Yanukovych, but interim Pres. Oleksandr Turchynov declined to sign the bill into law.
Religion
Ukraine: Religious affiliationEncyclopædia Britannica, Inc.
St. Andrew's Church, Kiev, Ukraine.Shostal AssociatesThe predominant religion in Ukraine, practiced by almost half the population, is Eastern Orthodoxy. Historically, most adherents belonged to the Ukrainian Orthodox Church–Kiev Patriarchate, though the Ukrainian Orthodox Church–Moscow Patriarchate was important as well. A smaller number of Orthodox Christians belonged to the Ukrainian Autocephalous Orthodox Church. In January 2019 the Kiev Patriarchate and Autocephalous churches were merged into a single body as the Orthodox Church of Ukraine. In creating the new church, Ecumenical Patriarch Bartholomew I formalized the independence of Ukraine’s Orthodox community, which had been under the jurisdiction of the patriarchate of Moscow since 1686. In western Ukraine the Ukrainian Greek Catholic Church prevails. Minority religions include Protestantism, Roman Catholicism, Islam (practiced primarily by the Crimean Tatars), and Judaism. More than two-fifths of Ukrainians are not religious.
Settlement patterns
Ukraine: Urban-ruralEncyclopædia Britannica, Inc.
Population density of Ukraine.Encyclopædia Britannica, Inc.More than two-thirds of the population lives in urban areas. High population densities occur in southeastern and south-central Ukraine, in the highly industrialized regions of the Donets Basin and the Dnieper Bend, as well as in the coastal areas along the Black Sea and the Sea of Azov. Portions of western Ukraine and the Kiev area are also densely populated. Besides the capital, major cities in Ukraine include Kharkiv, Dnipropetrovsk, Donetsk, Odessa, Zaporizhzhya, Lviv, and Kryvyy Rih. Of the rural population, more than half is found in large villages (1,000 to 5,000 inhabitants), and most of these people are employed in a rural economy based on farming. The highest rural population densities are found in the wide belt of forest-steppe extending east-west across central Ukraine, where the extremely fertile soils and balanced climatic conditions are most favourable for agriculture.
Demographic trends
Ukraine’s population increased steadily throughout the Soviet era, peaking at over 50 million as the country transitioned to independence. However, a low birth rate, coupled with an aging population and low rates of migration into the country, contributed to a sharp population decline that extended into the 21st century. Millions of Ukrainians—especially those from the western part of the country—sought employment abroad, and by 2010 roughly one in seven Ukrainians was residing outside the country for work purposes. These labour migrants most often sought work in Russia and the EU, and they predominantly found employment in the fields of construction and domestic service. Aware of Ukraine’s net loss of workers to immigration and a fertility rate that was far below replacement level, Ukrainian policy makers recognized the burden that would be placed on the country’s old age pension system. In 2011 the retirement age for men was raised from 60 to 62 and women’s retirement age was raised from 55 to 60. By 2017 it was estimated that at least 1.5 million Ukrainians had been internally displaced by Russia’s forcible annexation of Crimea in 2014 and by ongoing fighting between Ukrainian forces and Russian-backed separatists in southeastern Ukraine.