Is the population of Ukraine down to 19 million people in November 2023 because 4 million people left the country in the last two months? No, that's not true: The population of Ukraine in November 2023 was 37 million. According to the latest available data from the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees, there are over 6 million refugees outside Ukraine.
The claim appeared in a video (archived here) on TikTok by @agentkremlu on November 20, 2023. Another example of the video can be found here (archived here). It opened (translated from Czech to English by Lead Stories staff) :
The population of Ukraine has fallen by four million in the last two months down to 19 million, according to the ex-Prime Minister Mykola Azarov.
This is what the post looked like on TikTok at the time of writing:
(Source: TikTok screenshot taken on Tue Nov 21 23:53:33 2023 UTC)
Searches of Google's index of thousands of credible information sources using the terms "Ukraine population decline 2023" (archived here) and "Ukraine refugee wave" (archived here) in English and "Ukrajina vlna uprchlÃků" (archived here) in Czech showed no news about a new wave of refugees from Ukraine.
The population of Ukraine in November 2023 is 37 million. In September 2022, more than 5.6 million people fled from Ukraine. By October 2023, more than 6.2 million refugees were registered in Europe, and 3,6 million people were internally displaced in Ukraine.
In October and November 2023, the weekly flows of people from Ukraine and into Ukraine were more or less the same, the outflow bigger by a few thousand people.
