The history, the present and the prospects for the Ukrainians of southern Russia: demographic settlement aspect

This article analyzes various aspects of the historical and contemporary geo-demographic dynamics of the Ukrainians of Southern Russia. It shows the spatial, settlement and gender evolution of Ukrainian regional communities in the 18th-20th centuries, which along with the Russians played a central role in the development of Ciscaucasia. This fact allows us in the Ethno-demographic aspect to consider the second half of the 18th - the beginning of the 20th century as the East-Slavic period in the development of the South of Russia (the proportion of Ukrainians in its population makes 16-30%). The sharp intensification of assimilation processes in the 1920s-1930s led to a multiple reduction in the number of Ukrainians in the Southern macro-region. The second period of rapid demographic compression of the Ukrainian regional communities coincided with the post-Soviet period. In the 1990s-2000s the Ukrainian population of the South of Russia decreased from 589 thousand to 255 thousand people. Analysis of the current age and gender structure allows us to make a conclusion about a further accelerated reduction in the number of Ukrainians in the region (up to 70-125 thousand in 2030 and 45-90 thousand people in the middle of the 21st century) and the almost inevitable extinction of their regional communities.