The Ukraine War Just Turbocharged Russia’s Population Crisis

Putin is obsessed… with babies.

Native Russian propaganda that encourages Russians to have more kids is widespread, and, according to French demographer Laurent Chalard, Putin routinely advocates for Russians to “make more babies.”

In 2018, Putin even started paying the parents of firstborn children an allowance of around $180 a month for 18 months — as an incentive for couples to stop being so selfish and get to baby-making.

Chalard goes on to say “In his [Putin’s] mind, the power of a country is linked to the size of its population. The larger the population, the more powerful the state.”

And yet, Russia is undergoing a decades-long demographic crisis that has been worsened by Covid-19 and Putin’s disastrous invasion of Ukraine.

The population of Russia peaked in 1993 at 148,373,580. Then, Russia’s population entered a period of negative growth — that is, the number of deaths exceeded the number of births, combined with the number of immigrants.

After the collapse of the Soviet Union, Russia’s population was in free fall until about 2010 when it finally started to recover — and then, in 2020, Covid-19 hit.

Since the beginning of 2020, pandemic-related deaths in Russia totaled more than 700,000 people — and it’s thought that Russia vastly underreported their Covid deaths.