Yuliya Hilevych on demography in the Donbas
Research in a war zone
Door Yuling Chang
By Yuling Chang
Yuling Chang
‘There’s no scientific research being done anymore in the occupied areas of Ukraine, as far as I know.’
Ukrainian researchers like Yuliya Hilevych, UG assistant professor of economic and social history, can’t get permission to get into the Donbas, the region in Eastern Ukraine that has been controlled by Russia since 2014. And Russian researchers, she says, aren’t interested in going there.
Because of that, proper demographic research in the area hasn’t been done for years. The last time a population census was taken in all of Ukraine was in 2001, according to Hilevych.
The next time was supposed to be ten years later, but that got postponed for budgetary reasons, among other things, and in 2013, a wave of protests broke out against the pro-Russian president Yanukovych. ‘It was almost impossible to do a proper population census then, because Ukraine was kind of at war, let alone after Russia occupied the Donbas and Crimea regions in 2014.’
Depopulation
But Hilevych didn’t want to let that get in the way of her research on the depopulation of Ukraine. She was determined to conduct qualitative research in the urban areas of Mariupol and Kharkiv, rural Donbas, and separatist-occupied Donetsk – all heavily impacted by the war – to find out how people perceive demographic change.
Demographic changes influence people’s decisions about the future
‘Demographic changes aren’t just fodder for experts’, she explains. ‘If there are fewer children being born, or more people dying, or there’s more emigration, that influences the decisions people make about their future.’ It’s useful for policymakers to understand those decisions, she says, ‘because it helps them bridge the gap between politics and reality’.
Since it wasn’t safe for Hilevych and fellow researcher Brienna Perelli-Harris, professor of demography at the University of Southampton, to go into Donetsk, they had to find a more creative way to contact the residents.
‘Usually, we would talk to people in person’, says Hilevych. Now, they worked with a local survey agency, which organised online roundtable discussions with 134 participants across sixteen focus groups. ‘Since the Covid pandemic, online meetings have become the new norm, so that helped.’
Lost hope
She talked with the focus groups in July 2021, seven months before the full-scale invasion of Ukraine and seven years after the armed conflict started in the Donbas region.
In the period after 2014, there was a massive population outflow in Donetsk, which used to be the largest economic and cultural region of the Donbas, with a population of two million. Those participants who still lived there observed that their neighbours, friends, or family members had been leaving because they had lost hope for the future.
‘There are now fewer cars on the street during the day than there were at night before the war’, noted one of them. Many specialists, such as doctors, have moved to either Kharkiv and Mariupol or to Russia, which directly impacts the healthcare service in the area.
Vicious circle
Hilevych found the lack of prospects became a push factor for those under forty, and that created a vicious circle: ‘The fewer people, the fewer facilities, the fewer enterprises, the less life. Even within the service sector, nothing is developing’, a participant said.
The disappearance of traditions and culture also causes people to leave. If they feel their nation has gone, it doesn’t make them less of a patriot if they leave their country, explained one rural Donbas resident. ‘They are simply seeking better life possibilities, because here they feel insecure, deprived, and inferior.’
The fewer people, the fewer facilities, the fewer enterprises, the less life
Hilevych and Perelli-Harris were surprised by some of their findings. ‘The participants seldom expressed their political opinion, and none of them blamed Putin or the Russian government for the war in the Donbas region’, says Hilevych. ‘We suspect that they feared doing so might lead to deep divisions between friends and families.’
At first, it also seemed as if the participants weren’t actually aware of the population decline, which was contrary to Hilevych’s hypothesis. ‘I call it demographic awareness. People are aware of it when there are fewer children in the area, for example.’ When the researchers asked questions like ‘do you see the population has been declining in Ukraine’, or ‘do you think fertility has been declining in your city or in your village’, says Hilevych, ‘people weren’t sure what we asked’.
But as it turned out, it was a matter of rephrasing the questions. ‘It might be that the language of demography is still a very formal language in Ukraine, and the questions had too many professional phrases.’
Qualitative research
Hilevych’s research is the first qualitative demographic research in the Donbas region. ‘We are definitely the first people attempting to explain people’s perceptions of population decline in Ukraine, especially in the occupied territories. And I don’t know of any other research that separates the residents’ insights and the numbers.’
If you don’t have a proper census, you can’t do a representative survey
Most demographic research is quantitative and based on the national population data, which is why taking a census is so important, she explains. ‘If you don’t have a proper census, you can’t really do a representative survey.’
Technically, the last census in Ukraine was in 2019, says Hilevych. ‘But that one’s generally not accepted by demographers, because it was done to a new standard, and gathered data online instead of through questioning people during home visits. What’s more, it was done without cross-checking.’
And that’s a problem, because it means you don’t have scientifically sound data to work with. ‘Ukraine is really behind because of the census mess. The population in all of Ukraine has been declining for decades, and while that has been acknowledged, academic discourse on the matter is largely missing.’
No contact
Hilevych hopes to continue her research, but the full-scale war has made that even more difficult. ‘I can’t contact the participants anymore’, she says.
The interviews were not only conducted in Donetsk and rural Donbas, but also in Mariupol, which has been obliterated by Russian missiles, and in Kharkiv, which was likewise a major target. ‘We don’t know what happened to them, but we realise they might not be alive anymore.’