Kyiv
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Olena Bilozerska and her husband always knew they wanted children. She was 34 and they were ready to start trying when the war erupted in eastern Ukraine in 2014. The couple joined the fight and decided a baby would have to wait. By the time Bilozerska left the military, she was 41 and told by doctors her chances of conceiving were next to none. It was too late.
With the war in Ukraine about to mark its fourth anniversary, Ukraine’s birth rate is collapsing, with increasing number of people struggling with fertility or putting off the decision to have children. At the same time, losses are mounting on the frontlines, and millions of people who have fled as refugees have now settled abroad. The result is one of the world’s worst demographic crisis.
“It’s a catastrophe,” Ella Libanova, a leading Ukrainian demographer, told CNN. “No country can exist without people. Even before the war, Ukraine’s population density was low (and) very unevenly spread.”
Libanova said Ukraine has lost around 10 million people since the start of the war – between those who have been killed, left the country or are living in areas under Russian occupation. And while the country’s birthrate has been declining for years – a common trend across Europe – it has now all but collapsed.
Russia’s unprovoked aggression has forced millions of Ukrainians to put their lives on hold. But for many women, this decision can come at a huge cost.
When she came back from the frontlines, Bilozerska was told that her chance of having her own baby was at best 5%. “The doctors advised me not to waste time and take a donor egg right away,” she said. Not keen on that idea, she started fertility treatment – even though the odds were stacked heavily against her.
“Soldiers live one day at a time. They live to see the evening, to see the next day. They have urgent needs – where to get money for drones, for car repairs. They do not plan anything for the future,” Bilozerska told CNN in Kyiv.
“I consider it my moral duty to tell (military) women that if they want children in the future, I would advise them to get checked and freeze their eggs. I share my story so that fewer women end up in such a predicament.”
To maximize the odds of an in vitro fertilization (IVF) procedure being successful, doctors usually try to retrieve between 10 and 15 eggs in each cycle. In Bilozerska’s case, they managed to get just one, warning her right away that the chances of it being healthy were small. After fertilizing it with her husband’s sperm, they once again cautioned her: The risks of it not working out were high.
The next few days were torture, with the couple waiting to see if the embryo would survive. When it did, Bilozerska, then 42, was ready to take her only chance at having a baby.
That’s when Russia launched its full-scale invasion of Ukraine. As a fully-trained military officer, Bilozerska was immediately needed back at the front. The embryo stayed in Kyiv, frozen and stored in a cryobank with roughly 10,000 others.
“I went back to war, and I was so afraid that the clinic would be bombed, I called the clinic, I asked what would happen, whether the cryobank would be taken abroad, whether it was safe,” Bilozerska told CNN. She was reassured that the clinic had a reinforced wall protecting the embryos. It wouldn’t withstand a direct hit, but it would protect them from shrapnel and debris.
Dr. Valery Zukin is one of the pioneers of reproductive medicine in Ukraine and the director of the clinic where Bilozerska’s embryo was stored. The clinic is called Nadiya, meaning Hope in Ukrainian.
He told CNN the war is having devastating impact on Ukraine’s fertility rates. “I can see it with my own eyes. We are seeing more complications, more abnormalities, more difficulties carrying pregnancy to term,” he said, explaining that routine genetic testing on miscarried embryos has revealed that the incidence of chromosomal abnormalities has grown sharply since the start of the war.
Dr. Alla Baranenko, a reproductive specialist at the Nadiya clinic, said she is also seeing more cases of premature menopause in younger women.
“The quality of eggs is poorer and their number is decreasing – and it’s because of stress and it’s not just my patients, it’s also the egg donors, who are women without any reproductive problems. And yet the quality of their eggs is poorer,” she said, adding that the quality of sperm of Ukrainian men, especially those coming back from the front, is also worse.
“We have been preserving sperm for 30 years. When we compare the quality of the sperm of military personnel now with that of ordinary men before the war, it is, of course, worse. Stress also affects men, but it’s not just stress, it’s also the conditions they live in.”
Iryna Ivanova had all the telltale signs of early pregnancy. But she didn’t want to tell her husband until she knew for sure. He was very excited about the possibility of having children, and Ivanova didn’t want to get his hopes up in case it was a false alarm.
By the time she was certain she was carrying a child, it was too late to tell him. Pavlo Ivanov, her husband, the love of her life, and one of Ukraine’s elite F-16 pilots, was killed in action on April 12 2025.
When her daughter was born in December, Ivanova called her Yustyna – the name the couple picked together when fantasizing about having children. Yustyna has Pavlo’s light blue eyes and seems to have taken after him in her calmness.
“When I heard her cry, that first moment, it was as if I began to breathe,” Ivanova told CNN, tears streaming down her face. “You can feel the greatest joy and the greatest pain, and you just get used to it being part of you and your life now.”
Ukraine does not release its casualty data, but a report published in January by the Center for Strategic and International Studies, a US-based think tank, estimated that between 100,000 and 140,000 Ukrainians have been killed since the start of the full-scale invasion four years ago.
The country’s relatively high draft age and the exemption of the youngest draftees from the frontlines means the average age of a Ukrainian soldier is about 43 years, significantly older than in many western countries.
Because of that, most of the men and women who are losing their lives on the front lines are married with children – and Ukraine is becoming a country of widows and orphans. Official statistics show there are now 59,000 children living without their biological parents in Ukraine, most of them in foster families.
Oksana Borkun knows a lot about the stigma of being a young widow. Her husband Volodymyr Hunko was killed in Bakhmut in the summer of 2022. Having grown up in a culture where grief is meant to be private and women without husbands are often looked down upon, she has made it her mission to make the lives of Ukraine’s widows easier.
Sitting in a cozy cafe in central Kyiv, Borkun and her two friends Juliia Seliutina and Olena Biletska, were sharing stories over cups of coffee and hot cocoa, as the cafe’s diesel generator – made necessary by Russia’s relentless destruction of Ukraine’s energy infrastructure – hummed in the background.
The three women, all widows, were brought together by their shared grief and desire to help others in the same situation. Their online support group for widows of military men now has more than 6,000 members, and they organize regular in-person meetups, memorial evenings and other events.
Borkun is the driving force behind many of the projects, and it was she who convinced Biletska to get involved in a project that focuses on getting birthday gifts for children of fallen soldiers.
“It so happened that (my husband) Vovchik and I didn’t have children, so I was afraid that it would be very painful for me. We wanted this child so much, but it didn’t work out … it turned out that (working on this project) helped me heal,” she said, adding that the group is now sending on average 200 gifts every month.
A widow at 45, Biletska has made peace with the fact that she is unlikely to have her own baby. She and her husband tried for children and were seeking treatment when he went to war.
“The war took away the years when I could have had children,” she told CNN.
Iryna and Pavlo Ivanov were so set on having lots of children – definitely more than three, she told CNN.
Ukraine’s fertility rate, or the number of children that are born to an average woman over her lifetime, has now dropped to below one, compared to 1.4 across Europe and 1.6 in the US.
Even before the war, it was unusual for a young couple like the Ivanovs to contemplate having more than two children. They were exactly the kind of people Ukraine needed to improve its dire demographic crisis. But that dream died along with her husband.
Seliutina said that their movement is trying to empower widowed women to become active members of the society – something that she believes will become especially important after the war ends and Ukraine will start rebuilding.
Some 6 million people, mostly young women and children, have fled and officially registered as refugees abroad since the full-scale war first started in 2022. The vast majority are still living abroad, and Libanova said that the longer the conflict continues, the less likely it is that they will come back.
“With each passing month, there is more and more destruction here and, on the other hand, more and more of our war migrants are adapting to their new life abroad. Fewer are returning,” she told CNN.
The huge exodus is also a major brain drain for Ukraine.
“I hope that the most qualified people will return. … The economy and infrastructure will need to be rebuilt. We will need workers, and mostly skilled ones. If we don’t have enough of these people, we will have to bring in foreigners, which may not be a bad thing. But I doubt that many skilled foreigners will come here in large numbers,” she said.
Seliutina said this is where war widows, especially younger ones, can help secure Ukraine’s future.
“The young women who have lost their loved ones, they know the price of loss. They know why our men went there and why they cannot leave the country now. We can’t just sit and wait for someone else to do something for us. We are no longer capable of that,” she said.
Last year, as she turned 45, Bilozerska realized she was getting old. Not just for motherhood, but also for the war. She was serving as a sniper.
“I really couldn’t do the combat work anymore. Most of the men (in my unit) are young athletes … of course, I couldn’t keep up with them anymore,” she told CNN. Her commanders have long been suggesting she’d take up a different position away from the frontlines, but she had been resisting.
When her mother died, leaving her disabled father on his own, she knew it was time to come back to Kyiv.
Her embryo was still in Nadiya, having waited for her for three years. “I felt that this was my last chance to have a child. I went to the clinic for my embryo. And that’s how Pavlus was born when I was 46,” she told CNN during a walk in a wintery Kyiv park.
Baranenko, who treated Bilozerska at the Nadiya clinic, said that of all the cases she has worked on, it’s her story stuck with her the most. Over her 20-year career, she has helped to conceive 5,000 babies.
Pavlus, wrapped up warm and looking like a tiny snowman in his powder blue snowsuit, looked at her as she gently picked him up for a cuddle.
“His middle name is Bohdan, meaning ‘a gift from God,’” she said. “You pick him up and just melt. He reaches out to you, he smiles and you just go crazy over him, it’s impossible to describe.”
