Military-Age Male Manpower: Russia vs Ukraine

A cohort projection that decomposes the change in each country's military-age male population into its three drivers — aging (cohorts entering at the bottom vs. exiting at the top), migration, and combat deaths. Base year structure: UN World Population Prospects 2024. Every assumption is a slider — drag to test scenarios.

Assumptions
Notes & caveats

• Negative migration = net return (e.g. refugees / émigrés coming home — likely once the war ends).

• Pool = living men in the age band. Combat wounded who survive stay in the pool (still alive), so they are not subtracted — even though many are removed from the fight. Toggle this view of "lost to the fight" by raising combat deaths to approximate killed + permanently disabled.

• Entrants through 2042 are people already born (aged 0–17 in 2024) — that part of the decline is locked in regardless of policy. Only 2043+ depends on the fertility slider.

• Attrition is applied proportionally across ages within the band; combat skews younger in reality.

• Ukraine's 2024 base (37.9M) is a WPP estimate; ~5–6M refugees abroad mean the in-country pool may be smaller than shown.

Solid = full scenario (demographics + migration + combat). Dashed = same world with no combat. The gap between them is the war's marginal toll on the living male pool.

Annual change, decomposed


What the defaults are built on

Age structureUN World Population Prospects 2024, single-year cohorts interpolated from 5-year male bands (via populationpyramid.net).
Russia combat deathsMediazona + Meduza + BBC Russian probate-registry method: ~352,000 Russian men killed end-2022→end-2025; 2025 the deadliest year. Implies a recent run-rate near 100k/yr (default).
Ukraine combat deathsEstimates diverge widely: Zelensky cited ~46k (2024) then higher; CSIS put deaths at 60k–140k. Default 35k/yr is a mid forward run-rate; drag to your prior.
Russia migration2022 mobilization exodus ≈ 650k–900k left, ~650k still abroad (The Bell; demographer A. Raksha). Forward net flow is small and could reverse — default +50k/yr out.
Ukraine migrationMartial law bars men 18–60 from leaving, so wartime net outflow of military-age men is small; a large return is plausible post-war (set slider negative).

Sources: Mediazona/Meduza 352k · Meduza 200k+ · Casualties (overview) · The Bell émigrés · Emigration (overview) · UN WPP 2024 · Russia demography crisis. Forward projection from a 2024 base; not a forecast — a transparent calculator. Casualty figures are contested and unverifiable; treat outputs as scenario arithmetic.