Is This Putin’s “Mourning War?”

At Foreign Policy, Ivan Krastev discusses the “Mourning Wars” native Americans carried out when their populations were shrinking. The tribes attacked one another and absorbed the others’ women and children while killing off the adult men. Krastev wonders if there isn’t a similar philosophy behind Putin’s war in Ukraine, given Russia’s demographic decline. Krastev writes:

We live in a strange time marked by widespread and ongoing depopulation. The entire world is grappling with a crisis of childlessness. By 2015, the global fertility rate had dropped to half of what it was in 1965, and most people now lives in societies with fertility rates below replacement levels. Populations are shrinking across rich and poor nations, secular and religious societies, democracies and autocracies alike.

As the eminent American demographer Nicholas Eberstadt recently observed in Foreign Affairs, “Human beings have no collective memory of depopulation.” The last major episode of large-scale depopulation resulted from the bubonic plague that devastated Eurasia 700 years ago. But what history clearly shows is that depopulation always has political effects. These include a potential increase in warfare—fighting motivated by the desire to compensate, directly or indirectly, for population loss.

Historians have documented the so-called “mourning wars” among Native American tribes during the 17th and 18th centuries. They would raid each other’s communities, kidnapping women and children to compensate for widespread losses of their own people to contagious diseases and warfare. Women and children were absorbed into the raiding tribe, while adult males were usually killed, because they were seen as impossible to integrate. These wars, if they were genocidal, were wars of genocidal inclusion.

Which brings us to Vladimir Putin’s war in Ukraine. How different is it from the mourning wars of the past? In many ways, it resembles an updated version of such a war, a desperate attempt to replenish a dwindling population by forcibly incorporating a neighboring people into Russia’s own.

While the invasion was undoubtedly sparked by imperialist ambitions, anti-Western resentment, and a desire for Great Power recognition, it may also have been conditioned by Russia’s rapidly shrinking, aging, and emigrating population. Russia’s 2100 population is currently projected to shrink to a median of 126 million, an astonishing drop from its current population of roughly 145 million.

Putin’s interpretation of Russia’s dismaying demographic decline through the lens of a cultural war that the West is allegedly waging against Russia, its people, and its civilization, may even have played a decisive role in his decision to launch this cruel and devastating war. And for both sides, the war feels increasingly like a futile struggle to maintain a coherent sense of self in the face of a looming demographic abyss. The brutal nature of the fighting and the unwavering determination of the combatants speak to a profound identity crisis, one that reverberates well beyond the areas of active combat.

A speech Putin delivered to schoolchildren in Vladivostok in 2021, half a year before the invasion, offers a telling glimpse at his obsession with demographics. The Russian president told a story about an imaginary Russia that might have been but sadly never came to be. If not for the massive geopolitical shocks of the 20th century, he explained to the students, the population of Russia would have been around 500 million, three or four times larger than it currently is. Russia’s failure to achieve its demographic promise—not the end of communism—was the greatest tragedy of the 20th century. After reiterating the need to investigate why the country’s natural and predicted population explosion had failed to materialize, he exhorted: “In no case should we allow anything like this in the future.”

Listening to the Russian president talk about the downstream consequences of the 26 to 27 million Soviets who died in World War II, one might have expected him to pray that Russia would manage to avoid future wars. That, however, was the opposite of the lesson he wished to impart. What Russia’s history teaches, Putin explained, is the obligation to do everything possible to reverse the country’s ongoing population decline. Russia’s future depends on its successfully increasing its population; for Putin, population decline reads like a death sentence for Russian civilization.

Traditionally, Russia has defined its security vulnerability in spatial terms. Beginning with the reign of Ivan the Terrible in the 16th century, the Russian Empire managed to expand at an average rate of 50 square miles per day for hundreds of years. During the last years of the Soviet Union, it covered one-sixth of the habitable globe. But Moscow’s obsession with overland expansion and its thinking about security in terms of strategic depth is now a thing of the past.

Today, Russia defines its national security by the size of its population, not the extent of its landmass. Putin understands that, in the world of tomorrow, Russia will be a territorial giant and population dwarf. Russia’s population will not only be much smaller than the populations of India, China, or the United States but also one-half of Ethiopia’s and one-third of Nigeria’s. For Putin, this population decline translates into an irreversible loss of power. As he stated in 2020, “Russia’s destiny and its historic prospects depend on how numerous we will be.”

Read more here.