The population of Belarus today, according to the statistics committee, amounted to almost nine and a half million people. Among the CIS countries this is the fifth place after the Russian Federation, Ukraine, as well as Kazakhstan and Uzbekistan. Nevertheless, the population of Belarus exceeds the number of citizens of all the Baltic countries (1.3 times), as well as the inhabitants of Finland or Denmark (twice). This indicator is lower in comparison with Sweden, Austria and Bulgaria. The number of inhabitants of Belarus is approximately equal to the number of citizens in Greece, the Czech Republic, Portugal, Belgium, Yugoslavia and several other states.
The period from the post-war years up to the nineties of the last century was characterized by a tendency to constant growth of the country's inhabitants, as a result of which the population of Belarus increased markedly. However, in the last decades of the twentieth century, the rate of increase in the population of the country began to decline markedly.
Economic reforms of the perestroika era have affected many aspects of people's lives. The transition to market relations, the emergence of informal activities, the heyday of private business, the growth of unemployment - all these factors played a significant role in changing the living conditions of citizens. This also affected the dynamics of the number, composition, and also the process of reproduction of people living in the country.
With one thousand nine hundred and ninety-three years, Belarus, whose population began to decline, entered the stage of depopulation. The decrease in the number of citizens occurred due to the excess of the mortality rate over the birth rate. The result of this process is the country's constant movement towards acquiring the status of a smaller state (in number).
The population of Belarus has a multinational composition. Representatives of one hundred and thirty nationalities live in the state. The majority of citizens are Belarusians. Their share in the total population is eighty-one percent.
The largest percentage of Belarusians lives in Minsk and Grodno regions. At present, their numbers throughout the country are constantly increasing.
The percentage of other nationalities throughout the historical period has been constantly changing. He was directly dependent on external and internal factors (migrations, wars, and so on). However, invariably representatives of the second largest population group were Russian people. The proportion of this nation is eleven percent. Many of the landowners, peasants and officials began to live in Belarus after its accession to the Russian Empire. During the existence of Soviet power, this ethnic group outnumbered the Polish and Jewish ones, which corresponded to the geopolitics of the USSR. Currently, the residence of representatives of Russian nationality are mainly cities.
The population of Belarus in its northwestern regions is represented by a large proportion of Poles. It makes up almost four percent of the total population of this region. An insignificant level of migration of citizens of Polish nationality was observed in the Middle Ages. Today, most representatives of this ethnic group live in the Grodno region. They do not have any significant differences from Belarus in terms of domestic and cultural traits.