he population of Ukraine is 48.5 million people. By quantity of the population Ukraine occupies 5th place in Europe (after Germany, Italy, the Great Britain, France) and 21 place in the world. The urban population makes 68 %, rural - 32 %. The number of ethnic Ukrainians is over 37.5 million people (77.8 of the entire population); over 8 million people are ethnic Russians (17.3 percent of the entire population). Other nationalities comprise 5%. Among them are Byelorussians, Moldavians, Tatars, Poles, Romanians and Greeks. More than 15 million of ethnic Ukrainians live in other countries (diaspora); most of them live in the USA and Canada.

Ukrainian language was recognized as an official language in Ukraine in 1990, changed Russian. The most part of the population of East Ukraine and Kiev speaks in Russian. In the Western Ukraine the Ukrainian language is most distributed. In this connection mass media, politics and businessmen use both languages, but all official documents are published in the Ukrainian language. The lesser part of the population speaks in foreign languages - basically in English.

Ukraine is tolerant to religious confessions of all kinds. The biggest religious denominations are the Orthodox Churches of the Kyiv and Moscow Patriarchates (the Kyiv Patriarchate, dissolved in the Russian Empire, was re-established after Ukraine s independence). The Ukrainian Autocephalous Orthodox Church and the Greco-Catholic Church, banned in the Soviet Union, were revived after Ukraine regained independence. There are a number of other Christian confessions: Catholic, Protestant, Evangelical Christian Baptist, and others; in much lesser degree are submitted Judaism and Islam.