By Oleg @ Adobe Stock
In The Wall Street Journal, Betsy McKay and Georgi Kantchev explain Russia’s declining population and the problems it poses to Vladimir Putin’s goals for the country. They write:
Vladimir Putin has portrayed himself as a defender of global stability, leading a powerful nation that offers a robust economic, military and cultural alternative to the West.
One challenge to his vision: Russia’s population has been in decline for years, and the war in Ukraine has made matters worse.
At least 150,000 Russians are dead on the battlefield, according to Western estimates. Nearly a million fled the country after the war began. The number of births is at its lowest in more than two decades, with bigger-than-average drops in babies born in some regions closest to the fight.
The Russian president has called raising the birthrate a national priority. He declared 2024 “the year of the family” and enacted subsidies for those with three or more children. Putin has pledged to spend up to $157 billion on measures to support families and children over the next six years. Russian society itself, he said, has to change, with large families becoming more common.
“Motherhood is an exquisite purpose for women,” he said in an address on International Women’s Day in March. Family, he added, is “the most important thing for any woman, no matter what career path she chooses or what professional heights she attains.”
The biggest single boost to Russia’s population in recent years came when the country annexed Crimea from Ukraine in 2014, adding around 2.4 million inhabitants. Russia hasn’t included Ukrainian territories it has claimed in the war in its latest population counts.
“The most successful population program that the Kremlin has had has been annexing neighboring territories, not increasing the birthrate,” said Nicholas Eberstadt, a political economist at the American Enterprise Institute in Washington, D.C., who studies Russian demographics.
The country’s declining population, particularly those of working age, and its flight of talent are creating a demographic straitjacket, he said. “The loss of those human resources is going to compromise Russia’s economic future.”
“The demographic problem is indeed a very pressing one,” Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov wrote in an emailed response to questions. “Measures to increase the birthrate are a priority of the government and the president. Most of the country’s development goals are aimed at this in one way or another.”
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