Budanov Crushed Ukrainian Nationalists’ Fantasy Of An Ethnically Pure State

Andrew Korybko 

The irony is that they actually ended up building a liberal dystopia instead of a “fascist utopia”

The “Organization of Ukrainian Nationalists (OUN) and their militant “Ukrainian Insurgent Army” (UPA) wing, which genocided Poles and others in pursuit of an ethnically pure state, are the founding fathers of post-“Maidan” Ukraine. Ukrainian nationalists thus assumed that their fight against Russia from 2014, and especially after the start of the special operation in 2022, would advance this goal. Kiev’s banning of the Russian language, elements of Russian culture, and the Ukrainian Orthodox Church gave them hope.

This fantasy was just shattered by his Chief of Staff Kirill Budanov, who reaffirmed in late June what he said earlier in spring about the country’s need to attract more migrants since “There are significantly fewer of us now. I don’t want to scare anyone, but significantly fewer.” Around six weeks prior in early May, Minister of Social Policy Denis Uliutin revealed that only 22-25 million people still live in Ukraine. Of them, at least 10 million are pensioners per the Pension Fund of Ukraine’s estimate in early April.

To make matters even more concerning, UNICEF estimated last year that there are 6.6 million children under the age of 18, so taken together, that leaves just 6-9 million working-age adults left in the country. The World Bank’s latest data from 2024 estimates that males comprise 46% of the population, so that would roughly mean that Ukraine has only 2.76-4.14 million working-age males, a non-insignificant but unclear percentage of whom were either killed or permanently handicapped by the ongoing conflict.

If one accepts the Center for Strategic and International Studies’ (likely lowball) early 2026 figure of 500,000-600,000 Ukrainian casualties, then this means that Ukraine only has between a little more than 2 million and 3.5 million working-age males at most. Budanov therefore wasn’t exaggerating when he said that “There are significantly fewer of us now.” Of the 4.3 million Ukrainians in the EU, only 26% are adult men, so slightly over 1 million, and not all of them will return even after the conflict ends.

Ukraine will correspondingly have to promote the mass migration of civilizationally dissimilar foreigners, whether for economic and/or population replacement purposes, and they’re not expected to assimilate if the Western European precedent is anything to go by. Moreover, Ukraine can’t realistically ban their languages since they don’t speak Ukrainian and might not be fluent in English, which a 2024 law incidentally mandated across the state bureaucracy in a move that must have flustered the nationalists.

Far from becoming the ethnically pure state that they fantasized would follow the end of the conflict, Ukraine is on pace to become as multicultural as the most extreme cases in Western Europe, with English also likely replacing Ukrainian in everyday life as the lingua franca among its diverse population. Just as bad from the nationalists’ perspective was Zelensky offering his Western partners “patronage over a particular region of Ukraine, city, community or industry” at May 2022’s World Economic Forum.

The end result is therefore that Ukraine lost both its identity and sovereignty throughout the conflict unlike how the nationalists expected it to preserve both through their “sacrifice”. A split between them and the state is thus likely, though given how predictable this is, the SBU is probably already monitoring them to preemptively avert any manifestations of dissent, especially those that could take violent forms. The irony is that Ukrainian nationalists ended up building a liberal dystopia instead of a “fascist utopia”. 

Andrew Korybko, Substack, July 13, 2026  

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