A war in numbers: how Ukraine and Ukrainians have changed in the past year

And despite the fact that civilians began to die less often, the number of Russian attacks and destruction decreased, in the second half of the year there was an understanding that war is not only about territories, but also about endurance.

In such a war, what happens in the economy—how much product revenue, what costs can be covered, how many billions the allies can contribute—is no less important than what happens on the front.

We collected the main data on how Ukraine survived the second year of the war.

Some of them also indicate the direction in which events could develop in 2024.

 

The Dead

 

Two years after the start of the Russian invasion, the Ukrainian president gave an official number of military casualties for the first time.

"31,000 Ukrainian soldiers died in this war," Volodymyr Zelensky said, adding:

"Not 300,000, not 150,000, which Putin and his circle of liars are lying about."

At the same time, President Zelenski did not state the number of missing, as well as the number of wounded, so that Russia would not find out how many people "left the battlefield".

Throughout the second year of the war, as well as in 2022, officials did not provide any specific figures on the losses of the Armed Forces of Ukraine. But both the president and the representatives of his office spoke several times every day about 30 to 50 dead soldiers.

In January 2024, the head of the Servant of the People parliamentary faction, David Arahamia, said that he approached President Zelensky with a proposal to declassify data on Ukraine's losses in the war. According to the deputy, the number of dead Ukrainian soldiers is "much lower" than 100,000.

A year later, at the end of 2023, the world press published higher figures. In particular, the French Liberation wrote about 200,000 dead and wounded, the American magazine Time wrote about 100,000 dead on the Ukrainian side, and the British Economist in November - about 70,000 dead.

 

According to the "Book of Remembrance of the Fallen for Ukraine" website, the total number of soldiers killed or died since the beginning of the Russian invasion is more than 30,000. This information was collected in mid-November 2023 and was the basis for the creation of the Wall of Remembrance of Fallen Ukrainians 2014-2021. in St. Michael's Cathedral in Kyiv.

There were also attempts to calculate the number of dead according to the published decrees of the president on the posthumous decoration of soldiers.

Journalists calculated that by mid-October 2023, 14,402 soldiers were mentioned in such decrees. However, there are also closed decrees on posthumous awards, if they concern employees of the SBU, GUR and other special forces.

After his appointment as commander-in-chief at the beginning of February 2024, Aleksandr Sirski stated in an interview with the German ZDF that Russian losses, especially "the number of killed, are seven to eight times, according to the latest data, greater than our losses".

President Zelenski stated that about 180,000 soldiers died on the Russian side, and together with the wounded and missing, the losses of the Russian army could reach up to half a million people.

He also cited data on "tens of thousands of Ukrainians killed in the occupied territories".

In the second year of the great war, the number of dead and wounded among civilians decreased.

According to the data of the Office of the Chief Prosecutor (OGPU), from the beginning of the Russian invasion until the end of 2023, a total of 11,673 people died. Of that, 2,821 in 2023. That is, civilian victims in the second year of the war make up about a quarter of the victims during the two years of the great war.

In addition, according to OGPU data, 18,336 Ukrainians were wounded during the Russian invasion until the beginning of 2024. A third of this figure - 6,403 - falls on the year 2023.

At the same time, according to the calculations of the Office of the High Commissioner for Human Rights (OHCHR), which has been documenting civilian casualties in Ukraine since 2014, the death toll is slightly lower. According to UN estimates, from the beginning of the great war in Ukraine to the beginning of 2024, 10,191 civilians died, in 2022 8,260, and in 2023 1,931.

However, it stressed that "the actual number could be higher, as some reports are still awaiting confirmation." And so the number of deaths in 2023 is likely to increase due to the large number of deaths in the last days of 2023 and the beginning of 2024, when, according to preliminary UN data, 90 people died.

 

In addition, it is still impossible to determine exactly how many people died in the first year of the war in Mariupol, Lisichansk, Popasna and Severodonetsk, where large civilian casualties were recorded, but due to the Russian occupation there is no access to these areas.

 At the beginning of 2024, the human rights organization Human Rights Watch estimated that the number of civilians killed during the fighting in Mariupol amounted to at least 8,000. So, it is obvious that the number of dead civilians will increase over time.

 

War expenses

 

Expenditures for security and defense are financed exclusively by revenues from taxes and other payments that come to the budget from the Ukrainian economy. Now, in fact, everyone finances this item that "weights" half the budget.

According to the Ministry of Finance, spending on security and defense in 2023 amounted to 2.6 trillion Ukrainian hryvnias, or more than 40 percent of the country's expected GDP (final data on this will be known later). That is more than a trillion hryvnias or 72 percent more than in 2022.

Economists estimate that spending on the military alone in Ukraine exceeds a third of GDP.

For the sake of comparison: in NATO countries, which have a much stronger economy than Ukraine, in peacetime conditions this figure is up to two percent.

 

International aid

 

The second half of budget expenditures - salaries of civil servants, employees, social benefits - was possible to cover thanks to the financial assistance of Ukraine's international partners.

During 2023, aid came rhythmically and in large quantities. Overall, according to the Ministry of Finance, Ukraine received $42.5 billion in external financing. More than a quarter of this amount are grants, that is, that money will not need to be returned.

The main "sponsor" of Ukraine in 2023 was the European Union, which gave more than 19.5 billion dollars. Almost half as much came from the USA, which led the way in aid in 2022 - $10.95 billion.

 

Other major donors of financial aid to Ukraine were the IMF ($4.475 billion), Japan ($3.626 billion), Canada ($1.757 billion), Great Britain ($998 million) and the World Bank ($660 million).

At the same time, if the aid is "weighted" by the size of the economies of Ukraine's allies, then, according to the Ukraine Support Tracker, the largest support is provided by the Scandinavian and Baltic countries: Estonia, Denmark, Norway, Lithuania and Latvia.

The external financing received by Ukraine in 2023 exceeded both the volume of 2022 and the expectations of the Ukrainian government.

But, obviously, 2023 will remain a record year. In the budget for 2024, it was originally planned to receive 41 billion dollars from international partners, but later the Ministry of Finance reduced this need to 37.3 billion dollars.

 

 

Destruction and damage

 

According to calculations by the Kyiv School of Economics (KSE), which tracks Ukraine's economic losses since the beginning of the Russian invasion, by January 2024 the total amount of direct damage to Ukraine's infrastructure has risen to $155 billion.

In January 2023, these losses were estimated at $138 billion.

From the beginning of 2024, the largest share in the total amount of direct losses remains housing stock losses — $58.9 billion. And this is where the increase in losses is the greatest compared to the first year of the war.

Donetsk, Kyiv, Luhansk, Kharkiv, Mykolaiv, Chernihiv, Kherson and Zaporozhye are among the regions most affected by the destruction of residential buildings.

In the second and third place in the amount of losses are the losses of infrastructure and industry and enterprises — 36.8 billion dollars and 13.1 billion dollars, respectively.

KSE also calculated that as a result of the Kahovska HPP explosion on June 6, 2023, at least 19,000 houses were damaged - completely or partially flooded - in just four settlements on the left bank of the Kherson region.

 

Refugees abroad

 

According to the Office of the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR), as of mid-February 2024, there were 6.479 million refugees outside of Ukraine. A huge part of them - more than six million - are in Europe, while 5.809 million Ukrainians have received temporary protection there.

 

 

If we compare these figures with the first year of the war, the total number of Ukrainians in Europe is slightly lower, while the number registered in the system of temporary protection, which gives the right to work and social benefits, has increased.

According to UNHCR research, 80 percent of refugees from Ukraine are women, 69 percent of them have a family member who stayed in Ukraine. The average age of refugees from Ukraine is 44 years.

The largest number of Ukrainian refugees at the beginning of February 2024 was recorded in Germany - 1.140 million people, of whom more than a million received temporary protection.

Poland, which led the way in the number of refugees from Ukraine in 2022, now has 956,000 Ukrainians. However, overall, during the war, more than 1.6 million Ukrainians received temporary protection in Poland.

According to UN estimates, there are about 1.252 million Ukrainians living in Russia and Belarus.

 

Displaced in Ukraine

 

According to government data, there are almost five million internally displaced persons in Ukraine. "Of these, 3.6 million left their homes after the start of the full Russian invasion," said Irina Vereshchuk, Deputy Prime Minister and Minister for the Reintegration of the Temporarily Occupied Territories.

More than half of internally displaced persons receive monthly payments.

According to data from the Ministry of Finance, more than 73 billion hryvnias were spent on payments to internally displaced persons from the budget in 2023. That is twice as much as, for example, covering all communal subsidies in the country.

At the same time, according to the data of the Ministry of Social Policy, 158,000 people lost their right to payment due to going abroad.

 

According to data from the International Organization for Migration (IOM), the number of internally displaced persons in Ukraine at the end of 2023 was 3.689 million people. Almost half of them come from two regions - Kharkiv and Donetsk.

 

Also, about half of the displaced found refuge in two, in fact, regions on the front - Kharkiv and Dnipropetrovsk (somewhat less than half a million in each). In addition, Kyiv and Kyiv Oblast are a major resettlement center for internally displaced persons.

According to IOM, the main reason for the "popularity" of these regions is the possibility of finding a job. In the western regions, where in the spring of 2022 there were more than a third of internally displaced persons, by the spring of 2023 only 16 percent remained.

 

Two out of five displaced persons had to move several times - the IOM notes that this is due to the impossibility of finding work where they were. Men more often than women say that they cannot find a job after moving. Every tenth person moved more than three times.

According to IOM estimates, about 4.5 million people returned to their former place of residence after a certain period of displacement - in Ukraine or abroad. At the same time, 319,000 of those who returned from abroad became displaced in Ukraine.

Most returned from Hungary, Poland and Romania.

Only 37 percent of those who returned from abroad receive a regular salary. The rest live on pensions and social benefits for internally displaced persons.

In contrast to refugees abroad, the proportion of women among internally displaced persons is lower - about 60 percent, and the proportion of the elderly is significantly higher - almost a quarter of them are among displaced persons. Among internally displaced persons, there is a larger share of those who say that they exhausted all their savings during the war.

 

Economic growth?

 

After falling by almost a third in 2022, from the second quarter of 2023 Ukraine's GDP started to grow.

According to various estimates, growth in the second year of the war could be five to 5.5 percent. The final data on GDP dynamics in 2023 will be known later.

 

First of all, this is explained by the low basis of comparison - the decline of the economy in the first year of the war was so deep that against this background even a simple break in the decline will look like growth. After all, despite the renewed growth, Ukraine's GDP is about a quarter smaller than in the pre-war year 2021.

On the other hand, the Ukrainian economy has clearly recovered from the first shocks associated with the beginning of the Russian invasion. And some economic indicators turned out to be better than forecasts.

However, the effect of the low base of comparison has already worn off, and further recovery will be slower. This is confirmed by the preliminary data for January 2024, when, according to the calculations of the Ministry of Economy, Ukrainian GDP grew by only 3.5 percent compared to January 2023.

 

Hryvnia, inflation, prices

Among the indicators that showed better results than expected is the hryvnia exchange rate. The national currency of the country, which is fighting a major war for the second year in a row, even strengthened for most of the year.

Despite the fact that the government included an average annual exchange rate of UAH 42.2 to the dollar in the 2023 budget, the real average annual exchange rate was lower than government and non-government forecasts.

In the end, the NBU even decided to abandon the rigid fixing of the official exchange rate of the hryvnia to the dollar, introduced since the first days of the war, and switched to "managed flexibility", supporting the hryvnia with currency interventions from reserves.

But at the end of 2023, the hryvnia began to "give up". 2024 was entered with an official exchange rate of 38 hryvnias to the dollar.

During the second year of the war, news on inflation, another indicator within the purview of the National Bank of Ukraine, was equally positive. If Ukraine ended 2022 with a price increase of more than 26 percent, in 2023 it ended with an indicator that could not be reached even in peace, around five percent.

In the National Bank itself, these two indicators are connected in the following way: the stability of the currency made it possible to eliminate inflationary pressure. Among other factors, there is also a good harvest, which contributed to the reduction of food prices, as well as the freezing of utility tariffs.

As one of the main reasons for the stability of the exchange rate and prices, observers point to the refusal to finance the state budget deficit at the expense of "printing" money. And this, in turn, became possible thanks to the great help of

international partners, thanks to which the foreign exchange reserves of the NBU reached 40.5 billion dollars in 2023, surpassing the previous record of 38.4 billion dollars in 2011.

It seems that the more problems there are with attracting international aid in the future, the more difficult it will be to keep price growth and the hryvnia exchange rate under control.

 

From export to import

 

Before the war, the Ukrainian economy was mainly export-oriented. In 2021, exports accounted for about 40 percent of Ukraine's GDP and amounted to more than 68 billion dollars.

But in the second year of the war, revenues were reduced to $36 billion. In 2022, Ukraine could export 44.2 billion dollars.

In addition, in the second year of the war, imports into Ukraine were almost twice as large as exports. According to the data of the State Customs Service, in 2023, Ukraine imported goods worth 63.5 billion dollars. And the foreign trade deficit (excess of imports over exports) even compared to 2022, according to NBU calculations, has more than doubled.

This led to the loss of enterprises in the territories occupied by the Russians (mainly metallurgical), as well as systemic problems on all export routes - from the Black Sea to the western land borders with European countries, where the "corridors of solidarity" need to be passed.

The Russian blockade of Ukrainian ports in the Black Sea and Russia's exit from the maritime grain corridor forced Ukraine to reorient exports to Danube ports. And, also, to master and defend its own corridor in the Black Sea, relying on the protection of the Armed Forces for cargo ships.

At the end of 2023, the export of grain by sea was actually enabling the export in the volume it was at the peak of the possibility of the grain corridor with the participation of Russia and the mediation of the UN and Turkey in 2022.

In addition, metallurgical products began to be exported through this route. This in turn made it possible to increase the volume of work of metallurgical enterprises, which began to reach 70 percent of their pre-war capacities.

The western border, primarily with Poland, operated with significant restrictions from May until 2023, and was even completely closed to Ukrainian goods and transport due to protests - first by farmers and then by transporters, who believe that the presence of Ukrainian goods and services destroys their home markets.

 

Despite all that, Poland is among the top three countries in terms of volume of Ukrainian exports and imports.

 

In general, Ukraine exported the most to:

 

- Poland — for 4.7 billion dollars;

- Romania — for 3.7 billion dollars;

- China — for 2.4 billion dollars.

 

At the same time, the export of agricultural products brought the most revenue to Ukraine - by a large margin of all other items - for almost 22 billion dollars.

Metal exports were five times smaller - almost five billion dollars.

At the same time, for the first time in the years of the industry's existence, the export of IT services from Ukraine decreased - to 6.7 billion dollars. That's more than $600 million less than in 2022.

 

Wrong way?

 

Compared to the first year of the war, Ukrainians began to trust the authorities much less, and trust in law enforcement and the judiciary declined even further. However, there are also institutions and people that the majority of Ukrainians still trust.

According to a survey by the Kyiv International Institute of Sociology (KIIS) conducted at the end of November - beginning of December 2023, Ukrainians trusted the Armed Forces of Ukraine the most (96 percent), and this trust has not changed during another year of war.

Volunteers (84 percent) also enjoy constant and high trust of Ukrainians.

A January survey by the Razumkov Center has similar results: 95 percent of Ukrainians trust the Armed Forces, and 78 percent trust volunteers. Among the leaders of the trust are volunteer units, the State Service for Emergency Situations, the National Guard, border guards and the Security Service of Ukraine.

The majority of Ukrainians still trust President Volodymyr Zelensky, but their numbers have decreased significantly. According to the Razumkov Center, 64 percent trust the institution of the president, while 69 percent trust Volodymyr Zelensky himself.

 

At the same time, according to the KMIS survey, at the beginning of February 2024, 65 percent of respondents trusted Volodymyr Zelensky. And the resignation of Commander-in-Chief Valery Zalužni "cost" another five percent of trust.

 

At the same time, 94 percent of Ukrainians trusted the general, who retired in February 2024. His successor as commander-in-chief, Alexander Sirsky, was trusted by 40 percent.

Before the war, according to KMIS, 37 percent of Ukrainians trusted President Zelensky, but in the first months of the war, that number jumped to 90 percent. After that, support began to decline - in December 2022, 84 percent trusted the head of state, and at the end of 2023 – 77 percent.

Other central authorities have considerably less trust and it is in decline. According to KMIS, the number of those who trust the government and the Supreme Council halved during the year.

According to research by the Razumkov Center, the Government and the Verkhovna Rada are among the leaders of distrust. Three out of five respondents do not trust the government.

"The increase in criticism and the decrease in trust in the government is most likely a consequence, on the one hand, of unfulfilled expectations for this year, and on the other hand, claims about the efficiency and transparency of work," according to sociologists.

In general, according to KMIS data, there are fewer and fewer people in Ukraine who believe that things in the country are developing in the right direction.

At the same time, significant changes occurred at the transition from 2023 to 2024, when for the first time since the beginning of the war there were more people who believed that the country was going in the wrong direction. If after the first months of the war there were 68 percent of those who spoke about the right direction, then by December 2023 their number decreased to 54 percent, and in two months - to 44 percent.

The Razumkov Center has quite similar results. According to the center's research, if before the war, in December 2021, only 20 percent of the population was convinced of the correct direction of Ukraine's movement, then after the start of the war, by the fall of 2022, more than half of Ukrainians were convinced of the correctness of the path.

This indicator reached its maximum in the period February-March 2023 – 61 percent. After that, trust declined, falling to 41 percent in January 2024.

 

According to the Razumkov Center, Ukrainians most often criticize the following areas:

 

- the level of prices and tariffs (86 percent stated that the situation has worsened)

- the economic situation in the country (68 percent),

- level of stability (64.5 percent),

- citizens' confidence in the future (63.5 percent),

- the level of well-being of their family (58 percent),

- attitude of citizens towards the authorities (53 percent).

At the same time, there are areas about which Ukrainians react positively. It is about removing the consequences of massive shelling of the energy infrastructure, as well as the work of communal services and trade, food supply.

Positive changes in the last year, according to Ukrainians, mostly concern Ukraine's defense capability and international image.