The Organization of Ukrainian Nationalists (OUN) and their militant Ukrainian Insurgent Army (UPA) wing — which carried out genocide against ethnic Poles and others in pursuit of an ethnically pure state — are considered by many the founding fathers of post-Maidan Ukraine.
Ukrainian nationalists thus assumed that their fight against Russia from 2014, and especially after the start of the special operation in 2022, would advance this goal. Kyiv’s banning of the Russian language, elements of Russian culture and the Ukrainian Orthodox Church gave them hope.
This fantasy was just shattered by Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky’s Chief of Staff, Kirill Budanov, who reaffirmed in late June what he had said earlier in spring about the country’s need to attract more migrants, saying “There are significantly fewer of us now. I don’t want to scare anyone, but significantly fewer.”
About six weeks prior earlier, in early May, Ukraine’s Minister of Social Policy, Denis Uliutin, revealed that only 22-25 million people still live in Ukraine. Of them, at least 10 million are pensioners, according to an early April estimate by the Pension Fund of Ukraine.
Compounding the concern, UNICEF estimated last year that there 6.6 million children under the age of 18 live in Ukriaine, leaving just 6-9 million working-age adults in the country.
The World Bank’s latest data, from 2024, estimates that males comprise 46% of the population, meaning Ukraine has roughly only 2.76 million to 4.14 million working-age males – a significant but unclear percentage of whom have been killed or permanently disabled by the ongoing conflict.
If one accepts the Center for Strategic and International Studies’ early 2026 figure of 500,000-600,000 Ukrainian casualties, Ukraine has at most between 2 million and 3.5 million working-age males.
Budanov, then, wasn’t exaggerating when he said that “There are significantly fewer of us now.” Of the 4.3 million Ukrainians in the EU, only 26% are adult men – slightly more than 1 million – and not all of them will return even after the conflict ends.
Ukraine will therefore have to promote the mass migration of civilizationally dissimilar foreigners for economic reasons, population-replacement purposes, or both, and these migrants are not expected to assimilate if the Western European precedent is anything to go by.
Moreover, Ukraine can’t realistically ban their languages since they don’t speak Ukrainian and might not be fluent in English, which a 2024 law mandated across the state bureaucracy, a move that must have flustered the nationalists.
Far from becoming the ethnically pure state that they fantasized would follow the end of the conflict, Ukraine is on pace to become as multicultural as the most extreme cases in Western Europe, with English also likely replacing Ukrainian in everyday life as the lingua franca among its diverse population.
Just as troubling from the nationalists’ perspective was Zelensky offering his Western partners “patronage over a particular region of Ukraine, city, community or industry” at the World Economic Forum in May 2022.
The result, then, is that Ukraine lost both its identity and its sovereignty over the course of the conflict – the opposite of what the nationalists expected their sacrifice to preserve.
A split between the nationalists and the state therefore seems likely, and given how predictable this outcome is, Ukraine’s SBU security service is probably already monitoring them to preempt any signs of dissent, especially those that could turn violent.
This article was first published on Andrew Korybko’s Substack and is republished here with editing for clarity, fluency and updates on Trump’s response on Friday. Become an Andrew Korybko Newsletter subscriber here.
