Russia's demographic crisis

Russia’s demographic crisis is not a new phenomenon, but the full-scale war against Ukraine has turned a chronic condition into an acute strategic liability. Even before 2022, she struggled with low fertility, high male mortality and the long, echoing trough of the 1990s birth collapse. War intensifies each pressure at once: it removes men from the labour market, raises mortality, depresses births through uncertainty, and accelerates emigration of the young and skilled. The result is a shrinking, ageing society that is trying to wage an industrial, high-casualty conflict while her pool of working-age citizens contracts.

A stark indicator is the collapse in births. Russia registered roughly 1.22 million births in 2024—barely above the post-Soviet nadir of 1999—and analysts expect further annual declines as the small cohorts of women born in the 1990s enter and leave childbearing years. The total fertility rate hovered around the low 1.4s in 2024, far below replacement. Natural decrease (deaths exceeding births) persists across much of the country. These are not contested numbers: they come from Russia’s own data users and have been summarised by independent observers. 

War magnifies mortality and skews the sex ratio. Open-source counts by Mediazona and the BBC have identified well over 100,000 named Russian military dead, while Western and independent estimates place total Russian fatalities at up to a quarter of a million and overall casualties (killed and wounded) near or above the one-million mark by mid-2025. Even if one takes conservative readings, the demographic signal is unmistakable: losses are concentrated among young men, the very cohort already thinned by the 1990s bust. 

The labour market tells the same story in economic form. Russia’s own labour minister has warned that by 2030 the country must bring roughly 10.9 million additional people into economic activity simply to offset retirements and modest job growth. Ultra-low unemployment is now a symptom of scarcity, not abundance, as mobilisation, defence production and war losses siphon workers from civilian sectors. The Kremlin’s public readouts and reputable international reporting converge on this point. 

Emigration compounds the squeeze. The first mobilisation and subsequent waves saw hundreds of thousands—disproportionately educated, mobile and of military age—leave the country. Some have returned, but studies still characterise flows as large, volatile and damaging to human capital, with onward migration common. Even modest net outflows add up when they remove scarce engineers, IT professionals and entrepreneurs. 

In response, Moscow is both tightening the state’s reach and expanding pro-natalist subsidies. On the coercive side, the state has raised the conscription age ceiling to 30 and rolled out digital summons systems that make avoiding call-ups harder. On the social side, it has extended the long-running “maternity capital” programme and framed 2025 as a “Year of the Family”. Yet the toolkit increasingly includes illiberal social engineering: restricting abortion access locally and banning so-called “child-free propaganda.” Whatever one’s view of such measures, their demographic yield is doubtful: fertility decisions are most sensitive to household incomes, housing, health, and confidence in the future—precisely the domains destabilised by war. 

Migration is the obvious economic valve, but it is politically fraught. Russian business and state bankers now publicly argue that millions of skilled migrants are needed to sustain growth, even as xenophobic rhetoric, securitised policing and scandals after terrorist incidents push policy in the opposite direction. Central Asia remains the principal reservoir of workers, yet net inflows have weakened since 2022 and many migrants are now seasonal, transient or seeking alternatives to Russia. A state that simultaneously needs and stigmatises migrants will struggle to recruit and retain them at scale. 

Life expectancy, which plunged during the pandemic, has struggled to recover fully; independent demographers report renewed deterioration in 2023. High male mortality from cardiovascular disease, alcohol and accidents interacts with war losses to depress the number of fathers present and the perceived security of family formation. These are structural headwinds no decree can wish away. 

All of this feeds back into the war. A country fighting an attritional campaign requires a deep bench of prime-age men, a resilient industrial base, and confidence among young families. Russia can compensate at the margin with higher pay for soldiers, prison recruitment, longer conscription nets and greater use of migrants in civilian roles, but these are second-best substitutes. Over time, shrinking cohorts and excess male mortality raise the political cost of casualties; labour scarcity ratchets up defence-sector wage bills; and demographic ageing expands fiscal claims on pensions and health care, crowding out investment. The Kremlin’s current approach—mobilising society while suppressing private risk-taking—may sustain a war economy for several years, but it is at odds with the demographic renewal needed to escape decline.

There is, finally, a geographic and ethnic dimension. Regions with higher fertility (many of them in the North Caucasus and along Russia’s southern periphery) account for a growing share of births, while Slavic-majority regions see sharper natural decrease. Casualty burdens and recruitment patterns are uneven as well. Over the long run that mixture could alter the ethnographic balance of the Federation while deepening centre-periphery tensions over benefits, burdens and representation. That is not destiny, but it is a plausible trajectory if current trends persist. 

What, then, is the outlook if the war continues? United Nations projections and Russian analysts alike foresee population decline through the 2030s even under peaceful conditions; with war, the down-slope steepens. The most likely path is a smaller, older Russia with a tight labour market, structurally higher wages in defence and heavy industry, persistent inflationary pressure, and a state more intrusive in private life as it tries to command births, labour and loyalty. Such a state can still fight, but at rising cost and with diminishing demographic depth. That cost—measured in lost years of life, family plans deferred, and a future foreclosed—will outlast the war itself. 

If the guns fall silent, repairing the demographic fabric will still take a generation: improving male health, rebuilding confidence, cutting war-risk premiums in household decisions, and replacing coercion with credible prosperity. Until then, Russia’s demographic crisis is both a cause and a consequence of her war in Ukraine—and a constraint she cannot simply decree away.