Putin’s war escalation hastening demographic crash for Russia

Bloomberg

President Vladimir Putin spent years racing against Russia’s demographic clock, only to order an invasion of Ukraine that’s consigning his country’s population to a historic decline.
Besides casualties in the thousands on the battlefield, the enlistment of 300,000 reservists to join the fight — and an even bigger flight of men abroad — is derailing Putin’s goals of starting to stabilize the population already this year.
Crippling disruptions from the war are converging with a population crisis rooted in the 1990s, a period of economic hardship after the Soviet breakup that sent fertility rates plunging. Independent demographer Alexei Raksha is calling it “a perfect storm.”
Plans by Putin’s government had set the goal of starting to reverse the decline in the population in 2022 before growth should resume in 2030. Yet weeks before the mobilization was announced in September, an internal report drafted for a closed-door meeting showed officials were already concluding those targets were unrealistic.
Citing the consequences of the coronavirus and migration outflows, the report instead proposed a revision that envisaged a decrease of 416,700 people in 2030.
Should military operations continue in the coming months, as expected, Russia may see less than 1.2 million births next year, the lowest in modern history, according to Igor Efremov, a researcher and specialist in demographics at the Gaidar Institute in Moscow. Total deaths in Russia average close to 2 million annually, though the number increased during the pandemic and approached 2.5 million last year.
“The chief blow to the birth rate will be indirect, because most families will have their planning horizon completely destroyed as a result,” Efremov said. “And the impact will be stronger the longer the mobilization lasts.”