re: Latest Updates: Russia-Ukraine Conflict

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Hard to be certain given resolution, but I think even the KILOs have left

This is getting stranger by the minute

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A huge part of us prolonging this war is so that American taxpayers will foot the bill to rebuild.

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That's where 33% of the kickbacks will come from.

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Vladimir Putin has portrayed himself as a defender of global stability, leading a powerful nation that offers a robust economic, military and cultural alternative to the West.

One challenge to his vision: Russia’s population has been in decline for years, and the war in Ukraine has made matters worse.

At least 150,000 Russians are dead on the battlefield, according to Western estimates. Nearly a million fled the country after the war began. The number of births is at its lowest in more than two decades, with bigger-than-average drops in babies born in some regions closest to the fight.

The Russian president has called raising the birthrate a national priority. He declared 2024 “the year of the family” and enacted subsidies for those with three or more children. Putin has pledged to spend up to $157 billion on measures to support families and children over the next six years. Russian society itself, he said, has to change, with large families becoming more common.

“Motherhood is an exquisite purpose for women,” he said in an address on International Women’s Day in March. Family, he added, is “the most important thing for any woman, no matter what career path she chooses or what professional heights she attains.”

The biggest single boost to Russia’s population in recent years came when the country annexed Crimea from Ukraine in 2014, adding around 2.4 million inhabitants. Russia hasn’t included Ukrainian territories it has claimed in the war in its latest population counts

“The most successful population program that the Kremlin has had has been annexing neighboring territories, not increasing the birthrate,” said Nicholas Eberstadt, a political economist at the American Enterprise Institute in Washington, D.C., who studies Russian demographics.

The country’s declining population, particularly those of working age, and its flight of talent are creating a demographic straitjacket, he said. “The loss of those human resources is going to compromise Russia’s economic future.”

“The demographic problem is indeed a very pressing one,” Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov wrote in an emailed response to questions. “Measures to increase the birthrate are a priority of the government and the president. Most of the country’s development goals are aimed at this in one way or another.”

The main reasons for the low birthrate date back to declines in the birthrate during World War II and the collapse of the Soviet Union in the 1990s, he said. The government has had some success in the past with programs to increase births.

Shrinking
Before the Soviet Union came apart in 1991, Moscow presided over the world’s third-largest population, including states that became independent.

In the midst of the economic and social upheaval that followed, growing numbers of Russians died from cardiovascular disease, suicides, traffic accidents and other causes—often related to heavy drinking—and women had fewer babies.

By 2003, Russia’s life expectancy had dropped to about 65 years from 69 in 1990, far below many Western countries at the time. A more stable economy, along with policies restricting alcohol purchases and antismoking campaigns, helped push that up to about 70 years in 2022—still below most developed countries, according to United Nations data. The U.S. had a life expectancy of about 78 years. Estonia, a former Soviet republic, had a life expectancy of 79 years.

When the Covid-19 pandemic arrived, Russia was one of the world’s hardest-hit nations. Between April 2020 and March 2022, 1.12 million people died of Covid and its health consequences, said Alexey Raksha, an independent Russian demographer who was fired from a government role in 2020 after he exposed underreporting of Covid statistics.

That death toll was about the same as in the U.S., although Russia’s population is less than half the size.

Russia today has around 146 million people by official statistics, ranked ninth globally between Bangladesh and Mexico, according to U.N. data. That still leaves it far larger than Ukraine, whose prewar population hovered around 44 million and faces many of the same demographic challenges.

Unlike many Western countries, Russia hasn’t attracted large numbers of immigrants that are enough to offset its aging population and declining births, demographers say. Its population, like that of Japan and several other countries, is expected to decline over the rest of this century.

As many as 920,000 Russian citizens had left the country by July 2023 since the invasion, according to Re: Russia, a research and analysis group that based its calculation on migration data from sources in several countries.

Though some have since returned, many who have settled abroad are educated professionals in information technology and other fields. Official Russian statistics put the number of emigrants at about 668,000 in 2022, the highest since 1992, and about 450,000 in 2023.

The consequences are apparent in its shortage of labor to feed the needs of the battlefield. Putin has reoriented much of the economy toward producing tanks, missiles and mortars. He said last year that the lack of specialist workers is impeding military production.

Some 47% of manufacturing firms reported staff shortages in January, the highest percentage since 1996 in surveys by Russia’s Gaidar Institute for Economic Policy. Russia is short of 4.8 million workers, the Russian Academy of Sciences estimated in December. Shortages are especially acute in manufacturing, transportation, logistics and construction sectors, the central bank says.

Deaths of despair
Demographers say they are concerned the war may drive up so-called deaths of despair—from alcohol-related diseases and other causes—once again.

Drinking and drugs have long been a problem in Russia. In a televised meeting in 2022, Putin told a mother of a soldier who died in Ukraine that dying at war was more honorable than from alcoholism.

“With some people, it is unclear whether they live or not. It is unclear why they die—because of vodka or something else,” he said. But her son, he said, “achieved his goal.”

Much will depend on the length and scale of the war.

Putin’s heavy investment in weapons production has created jobs and boosted wages, but that stimulus could hurt future economic growth and “any drop in living standards affects fertility rate,” said Tatiana Mikhailova, a visiting assistant professor of economics at Pennsylvania State University.

About 1.26 million children were born in Russia in 2023, the lowest number in over two decades, according to government statistics. Raksha, who analyzes national and regional data, estimates the overall fertility rate—or number of babies for each woman over her lifetime—has remained stable since 2022.

Russia’s past crises continue to echo through the generations. The population slump after the collapse of the Soviet Union means there are fewer women of reproductive age today, Raksha said. The number of women in that age group is expected to shrink 40% by 2030 compared with 2010, he said.

One thing that is growing, Raksha said: the fertility rate for a fourth child. Russia has one of the highest rates among developed countries, he said. Fathers of four or more children are exempt from mobilization to the front, but the rate was growing before the war.

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Are they worried about aerial attacks at Novo?

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to the Caspian sea.

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One challenge to his vision: Russia’s population has been in decline for years, and the war in Ukraine has made matters worse.

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Russia broke it. Make them pay to fix it.

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