Ukraine’s Justice Ministry reported on July 5 that the role of the family as an institution has tended to grow stronger, with the number of marriages outpacing the number of divorces.
According to the ministry, since the beginning of the year, 110,000 couples married in Ukraine, while 72,000 filed for divorce. The ministry said that there were 50 percent more couples marrying than filing for divorce in the first half of 2007 compared with 40 percent more for the same period in 2006.
It said that weddings outstripped divorces most in the western Ivano-Frankivsk, Rivne, Lviv and Ternopil regions.
In the same period, the highest divorce rates were recorded in the regions of Odessa, Crimea, Luhansk, Kharkiv, Dnipropetrovsk and Donetsk, and the capital Kyiv, with between 3,500 and 7,000 divorces each.
Along with marriages, Ukraine is also seeing more births, although mortality in the country remains dramatically higher.
Justice Minister Oleksandr Lavrynovych said in a statement July 9 that times have changed from the mid-1990s, when mortality rates began rapidly growing while the birthrate began falling.
With a population of around 52 million before gaining independence with the breakup of the Soviet Union in 1991, today, Ukraine has just over 46 million people, and the population continues to fall fast.
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