It's noteworthy that Russia is one of the worst in terms of demographics, yet they're busily slaughtering their youth in Ukraine and driving their remaining talent overseas.
I suspect Russia’s demographic crisis was a factor in Putin’s invasion. He’s an old-fashioned imperialist and hates to reign over a shrinking, aging population.
Annexing Ukraine would have increased Russia’s population from 144M to 188M overnight. A great legacy for Vladimir the Cunning, in his dreams.
They are definitely attempting for a demographic darwin award.
Putin keeps talking about an existential crisis for Russia. He's right. Except the crisis is at home. Even before the war, Russian population was shrinking in size. Now with the war, he's basically losing a generation and massively speeding up the process. I've heard some comments stating that from a demographic point of view, this is the last generation even capable of pulling together an army the size that Russia is currently deploying. Next generations will be too small in numbers. As the older generations die out, Russia will have a much smaller population than it used to.
Despite abortions going down, population decreased by 1M people last year. The average age has dropped a few years. Population size basically peaked right after the wall came down and has trended down ever since. With the exception of a few years, growth rate was negative every year since.
well, the absolute grimmest, darkest and shittiest time, demography-wise or any other aspect really, was 1999 with fertility rate of 1.16, which somehow coincided with the peak of the official mad euphoria for the West and Yeltsin's drunken man-crush on his "friend Bill".
Currently, the fertility rate is on par with the US and most of the other urbanized world, life expectancy is up by whopping 8 years since then (not counting the Covid). That one million of lives lost is due to Covid and it seems like the country is pretty much in the same boat as everyone else now, slowly withering away.
I'd argue about the "are still fine" part.
My country was under soviet occupation. We were so behind that it's beyond scary. A plastic bag with Bruce Willis or Stallone's face printed on it was something out of this word. I'd argue that by the time the whole darn thing collapsed, we were 20-30 years behind the western world.
Is Russia "fine"? They still haven't managed to catch up economically or in development levels to the developed Western countries (and the fact that former Eastern bloc and even Soviet countries have shows that the gap wasn't impossible to overcome). They're also in a war they cannot win losing tens of thousands of men they can ill afford to lose, and only because they're stuck in the past politically and geopolitically.
