Putin wants to resolve the demographic crisis in the Russian Federation at the expense of Ukraine - Financial Times

According to the UN, for 27 years the population of the Russian Federation has decreased by 4 million people. The annexation of the Ukrainian territories and the abduction of children can be regarded as an attempt by Russia to solve a demographic problem. Russia is experiencing a severe demographic crisis. The invasion of Ukraine, during which Russia loses on the battlefield of men of fertile age, increases this crisis. But the war is also an attempt to overcome the problem of low birth rates.

Financial Times writes about it. According to the UN, for 27 years the population of the Russian Federation has decreased by 4 million people. In 2021, the Russians numbered 145 million compared to 149 million in 1994. Even the influx of millions of migrants from Central Asia could not influence the population reduction. The publication refers to the results of a study conducted last year by The Lanace.

According to the study, in 2022 in Russia excess mortality (ie the number of deaths exceeding the average indicators) during the Covid pandemic was more than 1 million. According to the Pentagon, in the war in Ukraine only for 2022 the Russian army lost killed 120 thousand soldiers. Hundreds of thousands of Russians escaped from the country, fearing mobilization and repression. The exact number of them at the moment cannot be calculated.

According to journalists, Russian President Vladimir Putin is aware of the extent of the demographic crisis in the country and takes some steps to solve the problem. In the summer of 2022, the Soviet-Heroine Mother Age was restored in Russia for women who gave birth to at least ten children. And in November 2023, another presidential decree 2024 was declared "the year of the family". "Putin is obsessed with this demographic problem.

In his opinion, the power of the country is connected with its population. The more people, the more powerful the state," says demographer Laurent Shalar. The publication writes that the annexation of the temporarily occupied territories of Ukraine, whose population was over 8. 5 million people before the war, may be an attempt to solve a demographic problem. In the same key, one can also consider the abduction of thousands of Ukrainian children who were taken to the territory of Russia.

In addition, the Russian Federation is active religious and public propaganda on the ban on abortion and the criminalization of LGBT. According to the expert of the Carnegie Foundation for International Peace, Andrei Kolesnikov, the events of recent years, including the pandemic and the war in Ukraine, "have created an extraordinary uncertainty in the future.

" Therefore, the population of the country, which is increasingly subordinated to the lives of its citizens by military plans for political leadership, is not motivated to give birth to more children. "We see the phenomenon that Russia has encountered many times - a wave behind a wave of wars and repression that depletes human resources," Andrei Kolesnikov explains. We will remind, the Supreme Court of the Russian Federation declared extremist and banned the "international movement of LGBT".