Despite the shock, pain, thousands of dead and unprecedented destruction, the first year of full-scale war passed for Ukrainians with confidence in victory and hopes for a quick offensive in 2023. These hopes did not come true.
And despite the fact that civilians began to die less often, the number of Russian attacks and destruction decreased, in the second half of the year came the understanding that war is not only about territories, but also about endurance.
In such a war, what happens in the economy – how much revenue it produces, what expenses it can cover, how many billions the allies can contribute – is no less important than what happens on the front.
We collected the main figures on how Ukraine survived the second year of the war.
Some of them also indicate the direction in which events may develop in 2024.
The dead
During the second year of the great war, the number of dead and wounded among civilians decreased.
According to the Office of the General Prosecutor (OGPU), a total of 11,673 people died from the beginning of the Russian invasion until the end of 2023. Of them, 2,821 for 2023. That is, civilian casualties in the second year of the war make up about a quarter of the casualties during all two years of the great war.
In addition, according to the OGPU, during the Russian invasion until the beginning of 2024, 18,336 Ukrainians were injured. A third of this figure - 6403 - falls on the year 2023.
At the same time, according to the calculations of the Office of the High Commissioner for Human Rights (OHCHR), which has been documenting civilian casualties in Ukraine since 2014, the death toll is somewhat lower. According to UN estimates, from the beginning of the great war in Ukraine to the beginning of 2024, 10,191 civilians have died, 8,260 deaths will occur in 2022, and 1,931 deaths in 2023.
However, they emphasize that "the actual number may be higher, as some reports are still awaiting confirmation." And so the number of deaths in 2023 is likely to rise due to the large number of deaths in the last days of 2023 and early 2024, when, according to preliminary UN data, 90 people died.
In addition, it is still impossible to establish exactly how many people died in the first year of the war in Mariupol, Lysychansk, Popasnaya and Severodonetsk, where high civilian casualties were reported, but there is no access to these areas due to Russian occupation.
At the beginning of 2024, the human rights organization Human Rights Watch estimated the number of dead civilians during the fighting in Mariupol to be at least 8,000. So it is obvious that over time the number of dead civilians may turn out to be an order of magnitude higher.
As in 2022, during the second year of the war, officials did not give any specific figures regarding the losses of the Armed Forces. But both the president and representatives of his office repeatedly talked about 30-50 dead soldiers every day.
In January 2024, the head of the Servant of the People parliamentary faction, David Arakhamia, said that he had turned to President Zelensky with a proposal to declassify data on Ukraine's losses in the war. According to the deputy, the president has not yet made a final decision.
But, as David Arahamia says, the number of dead Ukrainian soldiers is "much less" than 100,000.
Later, in an interview with the American TV channel Fox News, President Zelensky said:
"If we compare the number of dead soldiers, Russia loses five soldiers for every Ukrainian defender killed."
At the same time, he reminded that, according to the Ukrainian Ministry of Defense, the Russians lost more than 400,000 soldiers.
At the end of 2022, the Office of the President announced that 10,000 to 13,000 people had been killed.
A year later, at the end of 2023, the world press reported higher figures. In particular, the French Liberation wrote about 200,000 dead and wounded, the American Time magazine wrote about 100,000 dead on the Ukrainian side, and the British Economist in November - about 70,000 dead.
According to the calculations of the "Book of Memory of the Fallen for Ukraine" website, the total number of dead or deceased soldiers since the beginning of the Russian invasion is more than 30,000. This information was collected as of mid-November 2023, and it formed the basis for the creation of the Wall of Memory of the Fallen in 2014-2021 in St. Michael's Cathedral in Kyiv.
There were also attempts to calculate the number of dead according to the published decrees of the president on posthumously awarding servicemen.
Journalists calculated that by mid-October 2023, 14,402 soldiers were mentioned in such decrees. However, there are also closed decrees on posthumous awards, if they concern employees of the SBU, GUR and other special forces.
After his appointment as Commander-in-Chief in early February 2024, Oleksandr Syrskyi stated in an interview with the German ZDF that Russian losses, especially casualties, "according to the latest data, are 7-8 times greater than our losses."
War expenses
Expenditures on security and defense are financed exclusively by revenues from taxes and other payments that come to the budget from the Ukrainian economy. Now, in fact, they all go to finance this article, which "weighs" half of the budget.
According to the Ministry of Finance, spending on security and defense in 2023 amounted to UAH 2.6 trillion, or more than 40% of the country's expected GDP (the final data on this will be known later). This is more than a trillion hryvnias or 72% more than in 2022.
Economists estimate that spending on the army alone in Ukraine exceeds a third of GDP.
For comparison: in NATO countries, which have much stronger economies than Ukraine, in peacetime this figure is up to 2%.
International aid
It was possible to cover the other half of budget expenditures - salaries of civil servants, state employees, social benefits - thanks to the financial assistance of Ukraine's international partners.
Throughout 2023, it came rhythmically and in large volumes. In general, according to the Ministry of Finance, Ukraine received $42.5 billion in external financing. More than a quarter of this amount were grants, that is, this money will not need to be returned.
The main "sponsor" of Ukraine in 2023 was the European Union, which received more than 19.5 billion dollars. Almost half as much came from the USA, which led in terms of aid in 2022 - $10.95 billion.
Other major donors of financial aid to Ukraine were the IMF ($4.475 billion), Japan ($3.626 billion), Canada ($1.757 billion), Great Britain ($998 million) and the World Bank ($660 million).
At the same time, if the aid is "weighted" by the size of the economies of Ukraine's allies, then, according to the Ukraine Support Tracker, the largest support is provided by the Scandinavian and Baltic countries: Estonia, Denmark, Norway, Lithuania and Latvia.
External financing received by Ukraine in 2023 exceeded both the volume of 2022 and the expectations of the Ukrainian government.
But, obviously, 2023 will remain a record. The budget for 2024 initially recorded a plan to receive $41 billion from international partners, but later the Ministry of Finance cut this need to $37.3 billion.
Destruction and damage
According to the calculations of the Kyiv School of Economics (KSE), which has been keeping track of Ukraine's economic losses since the beginning of the Russian invasion, as of January 2024, the total amount of direct damage to Ukraine's infrastructure has increased to $155 billion.
As of January 2023, these losses were estimated at 138 billion dollars.
As of the beginning of 2024, the largest share of the total amount of direct losses remains losses of the housing fund — 58.9 billion dollars. And here the increase in losses is the greatest compared to the first year of the war.
Donetsk, Kyiv, Luhansk, Kharkiv, Mykolaiv, Chernihiv, Kherson and Zaporizhia regions are among the regions most affected by the destruction of housing.
In second and third place in terms of the amount of losses are infrastructure and industry and enterprise losses — $36.8 billion and $13.1 billion, respectively.
The KSE also calculated that as a result of the explosion of the Kakhovskaya HPP on June 6, 2023, at least 19,000 houses were damaged - they were completely or partially flooded - in only four settlements of the left-bank Kherson region.
Refugees abroad
According to the Office of the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR), as of mid-February 2024, there were 6.479 million refugees outside Ukraine. The lion's share of them - more than 6 million - are in Europe, while 5.809 million Ukrainians received temporary protection there.
If we compare these figures with the first year of the war, the total number of Ukrainians in Europe has become slightly smaller, while the number of those registered in the system of temporary protection, which gives the right to work and social benefits, has increased.
According to a survey conducted by UNHCR, 80% of refugees from Ukraine are women, 69% of them have a family member left in Ukraine. The average age of refugees from Ukraine is 44 years.
The largest number of Ukrainian refugees as of the beginning of February 2024 was recorded in Germany - 1.140 million people, of whom more than a million received temporary protection.
In Poland, which led in terms of the number of refugees from Ukraine in 2022, there are now 956,000 Ukrainians. However, in general, during the war, more than 1.6 million Ukrainians received temporary protection in Poland.
According to UN estimates, there are about 1.252 million Ukrainians in Russia and Belarus.
Immigrants in Ukraine
According to the government, there are almost five million internally displaced persons in Ukraine. Of these, 3.6 million left their homes after the start of the full-scale Russian invasion, said Iryna Vereshchuk, Deputy Prime Minister and Minister of Reintegration of the Temporarily Occupied Territories.
More than half of IDPs receive monthly payments.
According to the Ministry of Finance, in 2023, more than UAH 73 billion was spent on payments to IDPs from the budget. This is twice more than, for example, covering all communal subsidies in the country.
At the same time, according to the Ministry of Social Policy, 158,000 people lost their right to payments because they went abroad.
According to the International Organization for Migration (IOM), the number of internally displaced persons in Ukraine at the end of 2023 was 3.689 million people. Almost half of them come from two regions - Kharkiv and Donetsk.
Also, about half of the displaced people found shelter in two, in fact, front-line regions - Kharkiv and Dnipropetrovsk (a little less than half a million in each). In addition, Kyiv and the Kyiv region are a large center of resettlement of IDPs.
According to IOM, the main reason for the "popularity" of these regions is the opportunity to find a job. In the western regions, where in the spring of 2022 more than a third of internally displaced persons were, only 16% remained by the spring of 2023.
Every two out of five displaced people had to move more than once - the IOM notes that this is due to the impossibility of finding work where people move. Men are more likely than women to say that they cannot find a job after resettlement. Every tenth person moved more than three times.
According to IOM estimates, about 4.5 million people have returned to their usual place of residence after a certain period of displacement - in Ukraine or abroad. At the same time, 319 thousand of those who returned from abroad became immigrants in Ukraine.
Most returned from Hungary, Poland and Romania.
Only 37% of those who returned from abroad receive a regular salary. The rest live on pensions and social benefits for IDPs.
In contrast to refugees abroad, the share of women among IDPs is lower - about 60%, and the share of elderly people is much higher - almost a quarter of them are among displaced persons. Among IDPs, there is also a larger share of people who say that they exhausted all their savings during the war.
Economic growth?
After falling by almost a third in 2022, from the second quarter of 2023, Ukrainian GDP turned positive.
According to various estimates, growth in the second year of the war may be 5-5.5%. The final data on GDP dynamics in 2023 will be known later.
First of all, this is explained by the low base of comparison - the decline of the economy in the first year of the war was so deep that against this background even a simple cessation of decline will look like growth. After all, despite the resumption of growth, Ukrainian GDP is about a quarter smaller than in pre-war 2021.
On the other hand, the Ukrainian economy has clearly recovered from the first shocks associated with the beginning of the Russian invasion. And some economic indicators turned out to be better than forecasts.
However, the effect of the low base of comparison has already exhausted itself, and further recovery will proceed more slowly. This is confirmed by preliminary data for January 2024, when, according to the calculations of the Ministry of Economy, Ukraine's GDP grew by only 3.5% compared to January 2023.
Hryvnia, inflation, prices
The hryvnia exchange rate is among the indicators that performed better than expected. The national currency of the country, which is waging a full-scale war for the second year in a row, even strengthened for most of the year.
Despite the fact that the government included in the 2023 budget an average annual exchange rate of UAH 42.2 per dollar, the real average annual exchange rate was lower than both government and non-government forecasts.
In the end, the NBU even decided to abandon the rigid fixation of the official exchange rate of the hryvnia to the dollar, introduced from the first days of the war, and switched to "managed flexibility", supporting the hryvnia with foreign exchange interventions from reserves.
But at the end of 2023, the hryvnia began to “sag”. And it entered 2024 with an official exchange rate of UAH 38 per dollar.
Throughout the second year of the war, the news about inflation, another indicator from the sphere of competence of the National Bank, was just as positive. If Ukraine ended 2022 with an increase in prices of more than 26%, then it ended 2023 with an indicator that could not be reached even in peacetime, about 5%.
In the National Bank itself, these two indicators are linked as follows: currency stability made it possible to remove inflationary pressure. Among other factors, there is a good harvest, which contributed to the reduction of food prices, as well as the freezing of utility tariffs.
Observers cite the refusal to finance the state budget deficit through money "printing" as one of the main reasons for exchange rate and price stability. And this, in turn, became possible due to the large-scale assistance of international partners, thanks to which the currency reserves of the NBU reached $40.5 billion in 2023, surpassing the previous record of $38.4 billion in 2011.
It seems that the more problems there are with attracting international aid in the future, the more difficult it will be to keep price growth and the hryvnia exchange rate under control.
From export to import
Before the war, the Ukrainian economy was largely export-oriented. In 2021, it formed about 40% of Ukrainian GDP and amounted to more than 68 billion dollars.
But in the second year of the war, its revenues decreased to 36 billion dollars. In 2022, Ukraine was able to export $44.2 billion.
In addition, in the second year of the war, imports to Ukraine actually doubled exports. According to the State Customs Service, in 2023 Ukraine imported goods worth 63.5 billion dollars. And the foreign trade deficit (the excess of imports over exports) even compared to 2022, according to the NBU's calculations, has more than doubled.
This led to the loss of enterprises in the territories occupied by the Russians (mainly metallurgical), as well as systemic problems on all export routes - from the Black Sea to the western land borders with European countries, where the "corridors of solidarity" should work.
The Russian blockade of Ukrainian ports in the Black Sea and Russia's exit from the maritime grain corridor forced Ukraine to reorient exports to the Danube ports. And also to master and defend its own corridor in the Black Sea, relying on the protection of the Armed Forces of cargo ships.
At the end of 2023, the sea export of grain actually allowed to export as much as at the peak of the possibilities of the grain corridor with the participation of Russia and the mediation of the UN and Turkey in 2022.
In addition, metallurgical products began to be exported through this route. This, in turn, made it possible to increase the workload of metallurgical enterprises, which began to reach 70% of their pre-war capacity.
The western border, primarily with Poland, operated with significant restrictions from May-2023, and was even closed to Ukrainian goods and transport altogether due to protests - first by farmers, then by carriers, who believe that the presence of Ukrainian goods and services destroys their domestic markets.
Despite all this, Poland is present in the top three in terms of volumes of both Ukrainian exports and imports.
In general, Ukraine exported the most to:
- Poland — by 4.7 billion dollars;
- Romania — by 3.7 billion dollars;
- China — by 2.4 billion dollars.
At the same time, export of agricultural products brought Ukraine the most revenue - by a large margin from all other items - for almost 22 billion dollars.
The export of metals gave more than five times less - almost 4 billion dollars.
At the same time, for the first time in the years of the industry's existence, the export of IT services from Ukraine decreased to $6.7 billion. This is more than $600 million less than in 2022.
Wrong way?
Compared to the first year of the war, Ukrainians began to trust the authorities much less, and trust in law enforcement and justice bodies fell even more. However, there are also institutions and people whom the majority of Ukrainians continue to trust.
According to a survey by the Kyiv International Institute of Sociology (KIIS) conducted in late November-early December 2023, Ukrainians trusted the Armed Forces of Ukraine the most (96%), and this trust did not change during another year of war.
Volunteers (84%) also enjoy constant and high trust of Ukrainians.
A January survey by the Razumkov Center has similar results: 95% of Ukrainians trust the Armed Forces, and 78% trust volunteers. Among the leaders of the trust are also volunteer units, the State Emergency Service, the National Guard, border guards, and the Security Service of Ukraine.
The majority of Ukrainians still trust President Volodymyr Zelensky, but their number has decreased significantly. According to the Razumkov Center, 64% trust the president's institute itself, while 69% trust Volodymyr Zelensky personally.
At the same time, according to the KMIS survey, at the beginning of February 2024, 65% of respondents trusted Volodymyr Zelensky. And the resignation of Commander-in-Chief Valery Zaluzhnyi "cost" the president another 5% of his trust rating.
At the same time, 94% of Ukrainians trusted the retired general in February 2024. His successor as Commander-in-Chief Oleksandr Syrsky is trusted by 40%.
Before the war, according to KMIS, 37% of Ukrainians trusted President Zelensky, but in the first months of the war, this figure jumped to 90%. After that, support began to fall - in December 2022, 84% trusted the head of state, and at the end of 2023 - 77%.
Other central authorities have significantly less trust, and it is declining. According to KMIS, the number of those who trust the government and the Verkhovna Rada has halved over the course of the year.
According to a survey by the Razumkov Center, the Cabinet of Ministers and the Verkhovna Rada are among the leaders of distrust. Every three out of five respondents do not trust the government.
"The increase in criticism and decrease in trust in the authorities is most likely the result of, on the one hand, unrealized expectations for this year and, on the other hand, claims about the efficiency and transparency of activities," sociologists believe.
In general, according to KMIS data, there are fewer and fewer people in Ukraine who believe that things in the country are developing in the right direction.
At the same time, significant changes occurred at the turn of 2023 and 2024, when for the first time since the beginning of the war, there were more people who believe that the country is going in the wrong direction. If after the first months of the war, there were 68% of those who spoke about the right direction, then by December 2023 their number decreased to 54%, and in two months - to 44%.
The Razumkov Center has quite similar results. According to the center's survey, if before the war, in December 2021, only 20% of the population were confident in the correct direction of Ukraine's movement, then after the start of the war, by the fall of 2022, more than half of Ukrainians were convinced of the correctness of the path.
This indicator reached its maximum in February-March 2023 – 61%. After that, confidence declined, and in January 2024 it fell to 41%.
According to the Razumkov Center, Ukrainians most often criticize the following areas:
- the level of prices and tariffs (86% indicated that the situation had worsened)
- economic situation of the country (68%),
- level of stability (64.5%),
- confidence of citizens in the future (63.5%),
- the level of well-being of their family (58%),
- attitude of citizens to the authorities (53%).
At the same time, there are areas about which Ukrainians respond positively. This is the liquidation of the consequences of massive shelling of the energy infrastructure, as well as the work of communal services and trade, food supply.
The positive changes of the last year, according to Ukrainians, mostly concern Ukraine's defense capability and international image.
