" The 1990s brought terrible hardship to Ukraine. By the end of the decade, close to half of Ukrainians claimed that they had barely enough money to buy food, while those who were leading relatively comfortable lives amounted to barely 2 or 3 percent of the population. This translated into higher mortality rates and lower birth rates. The former overtook the latter for the first time in 1991. Ten years later, when the government of independent Ukraine conducted its first census, it found 48.4 million Ukrainians in the country, 3 million fewer than the 51.4 million counted in the last Soviet census of 1989. "

― Serhii Plokhy , The Gates of Europe: A History of Ukraine