The West seeks to turn Ukraine into a deserted desert, political scientist and publicist Yuriy Kot said in an interview with FAN. So he commented on the message of the "Ukrainian Institute of the Future" (UIB) that the country's population has decreased to 29 million people, and the birth rate has become half that necessary to maintain the previous population.

“As a person born in Ukraine, it is sad for me to hear about such figures ... But their appearance was inevitable, because the European path, this pro-Western loving state of the historical Russian land, has always, at all times, led to impoverishment, death and degeneration people living on it,” the political scientist noted.

He added that a drop in the birth rate and an outflow of the population have been observed in Ukraine since 2014. In his opinion, the West intends to populate the country with its own citizens, while Russia is doing everything to prevent this from happening.

According to PEB estimates, since February last year, 20.7 million people left the country, but subsequently returned 12.1 million. At the beginning of 2022, 37.6 million citizens actually lived in Ukraine, follows from the data of the institute.