The number of deaths rose to 783,800, 0.3% more than in the same period in 2019, while the number of births fell to 562,500, 6.3% less than a year ago. And that comes on top of a natural decline of 680,000 between 2016 and 2019, a figure equivalent to the population of the city of Irkutsk, Khabarovsk, or Barnaul.
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With the projected loss this year, Russia under Putin since 2016 will see its population fall by more than a million, equivalent to the loss of all the people in Perm, Voronezh, or Ufa. And if one considers the entire Putin period (2000 to now), Russia’s population loss by 2025 will be in a range between 4.5 million and 5.5 million, roughly the population of St. Petersburg.
It isn’t so much that Russians are dying in greater numbers bur rather than potential parents do not want to bring children into the world. The fertility rate, the number of children per woman per lifetime, now does not exceed 1.5, far below the replacement requirement of 2.2 children, in part because having children pushes people into poverty.
That is suggested by Rosstat figures showing that 26% of all children in Russia now live in poverty and twice that share, 52%, do so if they are in large families. As one observer put it to Krizis-Kopilka,
Read more:
- Russia’s replacement of population in occupied Crimea
- Is handing out passports in the Donbas Putin’s solution to Russia’s demographic collapse?
- Moscow’s efforts to Russianize non-Russians will lead to demise of Russian nation
- Russia has as many as 5 million homeless, not the 64,000 as Rosstat reports
- Declining birthrates among Russians accelerating
- Why Russians are dying says a lot about Russia and its regime
