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.
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.
This makes for a grim reading: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Demographics_of_Russia
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.