The war in Ukraine is measured in kilometres won and lost, but there is one bill that is quieter and perhaps more lasting than any front line: every year Ukraine loses around 800,000 people. Not only on the battlefield - but across the borders and through the empty maternity wards.

The figure comes from the Ukrainian economist and financial analyst Aleksey Kushch. Of those 800,000 a year, 500,000 is net migration - the difference between those who leave and those who return - while 250,000 is natural decline, more deaths than births. „So every year, minus 800,000,“ Kushch says, short and stark.

This is not an abstract demographic table. Fewer people means less purchasing power, a smaller domestic market, less labour, a smaller tax base for the state budget. In other words, even if the war stops tomorrow, Ukraine will wake up with an economic wound that will bleed for decades. The millions who left found work and a life elsewhere - and a person who built a new life somewhere rarely comes back just because the shooting has stopped.

And here the story turns Balkan. We know this bill by heart - not from war, but from the quiet, steady emptying that has run for decades. Every village with the lights gone out, every generation leaving for the airport with a one-way ticket, every maternity ward that closes - it's the same arithmetic, only slower. Ukraine is paying it now, abruptly and visibly. We have been paying it for a long time, slowly and more quietly. The question no one here wants to ask out loud is: how different are we, really?