The thinning of the East: depopulation in Eastern Europe

Friday 16 January 2026

Across Eastern Europe, depopulation is no longer a statistic buried in a ministry spreadsheet. It is visible in the emptying of village streets, the closure of schools for lack of pupils, the queues at clinics that grow longer even as the town itself grows smaller and older. In some places, the process feels slow and almost natural, like the ebbing of a tide. In others, most obviously in Ukraine, it has been violently accelerated by war and displacement. Yet the underlying pattern is shared: fewer births, longer lives, and the outward movement of working-age people.

The point is not merely that populations are declining. It is that the composition of society is being rearranged. A smaller share of citizens are in their prime working years. A larger share are retired. The geography of settlement shifts, with rural regions hollowing out fastest. Eurostat’s work on ageing and population projections shows the scale of the trend in and around the European Union, including sharp rural declines in several eastern Member States and candidate countries. 

Depopulation is therefore a political and strategic phenomenon as much as a demographic one. It reshapes labour markets, public finances, military manpower, and the confidence with which societies imagine their future.

Why Eastern Europe is losing people

Depopulation in the region usually arises from three interacting causes.

First, births have fallen below replacement levels. Eurostat reports that the total fertility rate in the European Union was 1.38 in 2023, far below the level needed for long-term population stability without immigration. Even where some countries record relatively higher fertility than their neighbours, the wider regional picture remains one of too few children being born to sustain population size.

Secondly, the population is ageing. People live longer than they did a generation ago, and the share of older citizens rises as births fall. Eurostat data underline that median age has been increasing across much of Europe, including in candidate and neighbourhood countries relevant to Eastern Europe’s demographic future. 

Thirdly, migration has drained working-age cohorts. The freedom of movement within the European Union, and the magnetic pull of higher wages and more predictable institutions in Western Europe, have made emigration a rational household strategy. For states that invested heavily in education after 1991, this produces a bitter irony: they pay to train doctors, engineers and skilled tradespeople, then watch the fiscal return on that investment accrue elsewhere.

War is a fourth force, distinct in character but brutally compatible with the first three. Ukraine illustrates how conflict converts demographic pressure into demographic collapse. Reuters reported in October 2024 that the United Nations assessed Ukraine’s population had fallen by around 10 million since February 2022, driven by refugee outflows, collapsing fertility, and casualties. Even if the precise numbers will remain contested until a post-war census, the direction of travel is unmistakable.

The geography of decline: cities, regions, and the rural question

Depopulation does not strike evenly. Capital cities and a small number of large urban centres may hold their numbers or even grow, drawing in students and internal migrants. The losses concentrate in small towns and rural areas. Eurostat’s projections emphasise that predominantly rural regions in several eastern Member States are expected to shrink rapidly, a pattern that matters because rural areas tend to host agriculture, border infrastructure, and a great deal of territorial identity. 

This creates a spatial fracture inside countries. One part of the state becomes younger, more connected, more internationally mobile. Another becomes older, poorer, and politically resentful. Policy then faces a choice between expensive territorial equalisation, which can become fiscally unsustainable, and a tacit acceptance that some places will wither.

Economic consequences: labour, wages, and the fiscal squeeze

The most immediate economic effect is a tightening labour market. A smaller workforce can push wages up, but in poorer countries it more often pushes businesses to relocate or to abandon expansion. Public services suffer because teachers, nurses and municipal workers are harder to recruit.

The longer-term danger is fiscal. With fewer workers supporting more pensioners, governments face a choice between raising taxes, cutting benefits, raising retirement ages, or borrowing. The Financial Times has reported on an EBRD warning that ageing populations are likely to reduce living standards by dragging on growth, with Eastern Europe amongst the regions facing a material slowdown in GDP per capita growth due to shrinking working-age populations. 

There is also a quieter effect that matters in practice: loss of institutional capacity. A state can survive being poorer. She struggles to survive being administratively hollow, when the people who know how to run hospitals, manage procurement, maintain power grids, or modernise tax systems have left, and their replacements are not numerous enough.

Political consequences: the power of older electorates

Depopulation changes politics because she changes who votes.

Older electorates tend to prioritise stability, pensions, and health services. Younger electorates tend to prioritise housing, opportunity, and reform. When the young depart, the political system tilts. Reform coalitions weaken. Patronage networks can become entrenched. Politicians may promise benefits that are mathematically difficult to sustain, because the group most capable of punishing them at the ballot box is also the group most dependent on the promise.

This shift also affects geopolitical orientation. Societies that feel themselves shrinking often become risk-averse, fearful of experiments, and suspicious of outsiders. That can complicate everything from labour migration policy to defence reform.

Security consequences: manpower, resilience, and the meaning of territory

For states on NATO’s eastern flank, and for Ukraine as she fights for survival, demographics are not abstract. They touch mobilisation, reserve systems, industrial staffing, and the ability to regenerate combat power over time. War does not only destroy equipment. She removes people from the future: those killed, those disabled, those traumatised, and those who settle abroad.

Even without war, depopulation affects resilience. A shrinking rural border region is harder to defend, harder to police, and harder to keep economically alive. Infrastructure becomes expensive per head. Emergency services must cover larger distances with fewer staff. In strategic terms, a state that cannot sustain settlement and administration in parts of her territory risks losing practical sovereignty there, even if the flag remains.

The European dimension: solidarity, labour markets, and a moral dilemma

Western Europe benefits from Eastern Europe’s out-migration, filling hospitals, construction sites and care homes. Yet the sending states bear the cost of demographic loss. This creates a European moral dilemma: a single labour market can produce uneven demographic outcomes.

Eurostat’s demography work shows that overall European population trajectories are sensitive to migration assumptions. In effect, one country’s demographic relief can be another’s demographic crisis. If Europe treats the problem purely as a national question, she risks creating a two-speed continent in which the East becomes a reservoir of labour until the reservoir runs dry.

What happens next

Depopulation is not destiny, but it is stubborn. The United Nations’ World Population Prospects 2024 describes a world in which many societies face low fertility and ageing, and where population decline becomes normal for some regions rather than exceptional. For Eastern Europe, the likely consequences over the next two decades include:

• Continued pressure to raise productivity, because growth cannot come from labour force expansion.

• Intensifying competition for migrants, including return migration from the diaspora and labour migration from outside Europe.

• Rising political weight of pension policy, health policy, and regional redistribution.

• A sharper distinction between capital cities and the rest, unless governments invest heavily in connectivity and regional development.

• In Ukraine’s case, an additional imperative: post-war reconstruction will require workers at scale, yet the war has pushed many potential workers abroad and reduced births sharply, compounding a pre-existing demographic decline. 

The deeper consequence is psychological. A society that believes she is shrinking can lose the habit of long-term planning. She becomes a caretaker of decline rather than an architect of the future. Eastern Europe’s challenge is therefore not only to manage pensions and clinics, but to sustain the idea that the region can still grow in quality even if she shrinks in quantity.