Russia is facing a shrinking and aging population and is trying to draft anti-war laws

For a quarter of a century, President Vladimir Putin has faced the question of Russia’s shrinking and aging population.

In 1999, the year before he returned, the number of children born in Russia reached its lowest level. In 2005, Putin said that people’s woes needed to be solved by preserving “social and economic stability.”

In 2019, he said that the problem “troubled” the country.

As recently as Thursday, he told the Kremlin Demographic conference that increasing the birth rate was ‘important’ for Russia.

Putin has launched efforts to encourage people to have more children – from free school meals for large families to awarding Soviet “Hero-mother” medals to women who have 10 or more children.

“Many of our grandmothers and great-grandmothers had seven, eight, and more children,” Putin said in 2023. “Let’s revive and revive these wonderful traditions.”

Initially, births in Russia increased with its economic prosperity, from 1.11 million births in 1999 to 1.94 million in 2015.

But those hard-judged gains are falling against a backdrop of financial uncertainty, the war in Ukraine, the exodus of young men and dissent.

Russia’s population fell from 147.6 million in 1990 – the year before the USSR – to 146.1 million this year, according to Russia’s Federal Statistics service. Since the year 2014, which is illegal in Crimea, it has included the population of the Peninsula of about two million, as well as births and deaths there, in its data.

The population is very old. In 1990, 21.1% were 55 or older, government data show. By 2024, that number was 30%.

Since the peak of 2015, the number of births has fallen every year, and deaths are now born. There were only 1.22 million live births per year above the low of 1999. Demographer Alexei Raksha reported that the number of children born in Russia in February 2025 was the lowest for two months in two centuries.

Russia is trying new restrictions to stop the backliderlide and accept what it calls “traditional family values” with laws that prohibit promoting abortion and “Ideology of Children.

The authorities believe such values ​​as a “magic wand” to solve people’s problems, says Russian feminist Shasha Talaver.

In the government’s view, women can be financially independent, but they must be “willing and very happy to take on this additional work of reproduction in the name of the emergence of the spirit of patriotism and strength in Russia,” she said.

A Painful History

In Russia, as in the west, declining births are often linked to economic turmoil. New couples in low-income apartments, unable to buy their own homes or afraid of their jobs, are often not confident enough to raise a child.

But Russia is drawn by a harsh history.

About 27 million Soviet citizens died in World War II, greatly reducing the male population.

As the country began to recover, the Soviet Union collapsed, and births fell again.

The number of Russian women in their 20s and 30s is small, says Jenny Mathers of the University of Aberystwyth in Wales, who wishes to have as many children as possible from this very small number of women. “

Although Russia has not said how many troops have been killed in Ukraine, Western estimates put the death toll in the hundreds of thousands. When the war began, many young Russians moved abroad – some of the reasons for the idea were to escape from disintegration or to avoid military action.

“You’ve got the shallowest pool that fathers can have in a shallow pool,” Mathers said. That is Putin’s particular problem, which is a combination of population and national security, he said.

Other family-friendly options are popular, such as parental cash certificates that may go towards pensions, education or mortgages.

Some are controversial, such as the one-time payment of about $1,200 for teenage pregnancies in some states. Authorities say these are meant to support vulnerable mothers, but critics say they encourage such pregnancies.

And some programs seem symbolic. Since 2022, Russia has created Ministry holidays such as family day, love and trust day on July Day, and Pregnant Day – Celebrated on April 7 and Oct. 7.

Last year, Russia’s fertility rate – the number of children born per woman – was 1.4, state media said. That’s below the replacement rate of 2.1 people in the population, and slightly lower than the US figure of 1.6 released by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.

Discouraging Abortion

Some states have laws that make it illegal to “promote abortion,” while a national law in 2024 banned promoting ‘baby propaganda.’ The words of such rules are often left open to interpretation, but this change is enough to provoke the producers of the reality TV hit “16 and pregnant” to change the name of the show to “Mammy at 16.”

For many women, the steps make the sensitive conversations more full. A 29-year-old woman who decided to have children told the media that she was seeing a gynecologist at a clinic in Moscow, rather than being protected from questions.

“That I plan to have children, even if I don’t plan to have children – I am not asked about them all,” she said, speaking on the condition of anonymity because she is afraid of the opposition. “It’s a completely different story” at state-run clinics, he said.

An increasing number of laws restrict access to abortion. While the procedure remains legal and widely available, private clinics no longer offer abortion services. The new law has banned the sale of abortion pills, contraceptives and other emergency contraceptives.

Women are encouraged to go to state clinics, where waits are long and some sites refuse to perform abortions on certain days. When patients complete mandatory counseling and mandatory waiting periods of 48 hours and a week, they risk exceeding the official discharge time.

Abortions have fallen sharply under these laws, although experts say the number of procedures is already falling. However, there has not been a corresponding increase in births, and activists believe that banning abortion will only harm the health of women and children.

“The only thing you will get from this is illegal abortions. That means more deaths: More child deaths and more women deaths,” said Russian activist Zalina Marshkunulova.

He sees the new government restrictions as a crackdown on refunds. “They are there to shut down, to block any voice of freedom,” he told AS.

Folding displacement

Russia could increase its population by allowing more immigrants – something that is expected to be more likely to be welcomed.

Russian authorities have recently embarked on an anti-immigration crackdown, tracking their movements, cracking down on their jobs and protecting their children’s rights to education. Central Asians have traditionally traveled to Russia for work elsewhere, hoping to avoid growing discrimination and economic uncertainty.

While the war in Ukraine continues, Moscow can promise financial rewards that should be parented but not the resilience needed to gamble in the future.

When people are pessimistic about their prospects, it is not the time to have children, it means: “A big open war does not really encourage people to think well about the future.”

A 29-year-old woman who chose not to have children.

“The happiest and healthiest child will be born into a family with healthy, happy parents,” she said.