Russian demographic decline

Russia’s coming demographic decline is no longer a speculative curiosity for demographers. It is now one of the central structural constraints on the country’s future power, prosperity and capacity to wage prolonged war. Population projections out to mid-century show Russia shrinking, ageing and losing workers, even under relatively optimistic assumptions about fertility and migration.

Baseline: what the projections actually say

Russia’s population peaked at just under 149 million at the end of the Soviet period and has hovered in the mid-140 millions for most of the last two decades. United Nations estimates, as collated in the 2024 World Population Prospects and presented by Worldometer, put Russia’s mid-2025 population at about 144 million, with the country already on a gentle but persistent downward slope.

On the same UN medium-variant assumptions, Russia’s population is projected to fall to about 141.9 million in 2030, 139.9 million in 2035, 138.3 million in 2040, 137.2 million in 2045 and 136.1 million by 2050. This is not an abrupt collapse, but it is a clear, sustained decline over a generation, with no projected return to growth thereafter.

Russia’s own statistics service, Rosstat, has published several scenarios, most recently projecting that the population could fall from roughly 146.5 million in 2023 to about 138.8 million by 2046 under its central case, and as low as about 134 million under earlier pessimistic assumptions. Independent reporting, including a widely cited analysis in Le Monde, summarises current expert expectations as a range between roughly 130 and 139 million by the mid-2040s, depending on migration and fertility.

Where demographers differ is not on whether Russia will shrink, but on how quickly, and how the age structure will change. UN projections suggest that by 2050 roughly one fifth to one quarter of Russians will be 65 or older, pushing the country firmly into the group of aged societies.

Low fertility as the central driver

The most important single reason for Russia’s anticipated population decline is sustained low fertility. Replacement level in industrial societies is about 2.1 children per woman. Russia’s total fertility rate has been substantially below that figure since the early 1990s, with only a brief, modest recovery during the mid-2000s and early 2010s.

Rosstat data show a total fertility rate of about 1.42 in 2022 and roughly 1.40 in 2024, despite years of pro-natalist policy. The number of births is correspondingly low. In 2024 Russia registered approximately 1.22 million births, the lowest annual total since 1999 and about one third fewer than in 2014. For comparison, at the end of the Soviet period annual births exceeded 2 million.

The immediate reason for such low birth numbers is not only that women have fewer children, but that there are fewer women of childbearing age at all. The cohorts born in the turbulent 1990s, when fertility collapsed in the aftermath of the Soviet Union’s break-up, are now of prime reproductive age. They are smaller, poorer on average, more urban and more sceptical about having large families than their mothers’ generation. That structural deficit cannot be reversed quickly: even a sudden rise in fertility per woman would operate on a narrower base.

Pro-natalist measures introduced under Vladimir Putin – cash payments for third and subsequent children, subsidised mortgages for families, and more recently increasingly eccentric schemes such as paying teenage mothers and promoting early childbirth on state television – have so far failed to change the trajectory. Fertility tends to respond more to housing, job security, childcare and expectations of the future than to one-off bonuses, and Russia offers young families little reassurance on any of those fronts.

Mortality, health and life expectancy

Declining fertility might still be balanced by increasing life expectancy, as has happened in a number of European states. Russia is different because mortality remains high, particularly for men, and has been buffeted by successive shocks.

Demographers have long described the post-Soviet mortality crisis: widespread alcoholism, cardiovascular disease, weak primary health care and dangerous working conditions pushed male life expectancy down to levels more typical of developing countries. There was some improvement in the 2000s and 2010s, but the COVID-19 pandemic produced Russia’s largest peacetime population decline in modern history, with deaths surging well above births.

Analyses of Russian data suggest that excess mortality remained elevated through 2022 and 2023, even after the worst of COVID-19 had passed. One study estimates around 138,500 excess deaths amongst men aged 20 to 54 over those two years, compared with pre-pandemic trends. A substantial part of this excess is attributed, directly or indirectly, to the war in Ukraine, the mobilisation of reservists and the strain placed upon the health system.

Independent reporting from Russian demographers points to a renewed rise in the overall death rate in 2023 and 2024, with mortality increasing by roughly 5 per cent in 2024 relative to 2023. Although the war is not the only factor – ageing cohorts and persistent alcohol abuse remain central – it reinforces the trend.

The result is a persistent “natural decline”: every year, more deaths than births. Rosstat’s own figures indicate a natural population decrease of roughly half a million people in 2023 and almost 600,000 in 2024, an increase of some 20 per cent in the annual natural loss. So even if migration were roughly balanced, the population would now be shrinking by several hundred thousand per year.

War, emigration and the loss of working-age men

The war in Ukraine has added an unmistakably demographic dimension. Fighting with an average age of around 35 for Russian combatants, the conflict is removing men directly through battlefield deaths and indirectly through war-related accidents, disease and suicide. One French analysis warns that if losses reach about a million men, including between 120,000 and 200,000 killed, the impact upon Russia’s demographic and economic future will be severe.

Beyond casualties, partial mobilisation and tightening repression have prompted substantial emigration. Hundreds of thousands of mostly young, educated Russians are estimated to have left since February 2022, heading for Georgia, Armenia, Kazakhstan, the Balkans, the Baltic states, Turkey and the West. Their precise numbers are contested, but their profile is not: these are disproportionately skilled workers, professionals in information technology, finance and the creative industries, and members of the urban middle class. They are exactly the sort of people a country with an ageing population would wish to keep.

This double blow – the removal of a slice of the male working-age population through death, disability and mobilisation, and the exit of another slice through emigration – amplifies trends that were already under way. A recent analysis of Russia’s labour force notes that the country lost almost six million workers between 2007 and 2021, before the war, and now faces a severe labour shortage that authorities themselves acknowledge.

Ageing and the structure of the population

Russia is not only shrinking; she is ageing. The median age is already above 40 and is projected to rise further, as low fertility interacts with increasing longevity for those who survive into later life. UN projections indicate that by 2050 roughly 22 per cent of Russians will be aged 65 or older, up from around 15 per cent today.

This ageing is not evenly distributed. Younger populations are disproportionately concentrated in certain ethnic republics, particularly in the North Caucasus, where Muslim communities have higher fertility rates. By contrast many ethnic-Russian regions in the centre and north-west of the country have seen births collapse and deaths rise, with some provinces recording two or even three deaths for every birth in recent years.

Urbanisation policy interacts with this pattern. Research on the state’s strategy of concentrating investment in a handful of large urban agglomerations concludes that, given current low birth rates and negligible net migration, Russia’s population will continue to decline under all scenarios. The depopulation of smaller towns and rural regions is intensified as young people move to Moscow, Saint Petersburg and a few other centres, and then have fewer children once they arrive.

The outcome is a country with a shrinking peripheral population, hollowed-out provincial towns and a few large cities that themselves are ageing. The demographic map becomes strategically unbalanced: long borders in the Arctic and Far East are guarded by ever fewer people, whilst a disproportionate share of the remaining population is concentrated in European Russia.

Migration: limited offset, political constraints

In principle, Russia might offset declining fertility and high mortality through immigration, especially from former Soviet republics in Central Asia and the South Caucasus. For a time this seemed plausible: in the 2000s and early 2010s net migration was positive and helped stabilise the total population.

More recently, however, migration has been insufficient to compensate for natural decline. The war has made Russia less attractive for many potential migrants, although Moscow still recruits workers from India, China, Turkey and Serbia to plug specific gaps. The state is also wary of large-scale immigration that might alter the country’s ethnic balance, particularly given nationalist rhetoric about preserving a Russian cultural core.

Demographically, the numbers required to stabilise the population would be large, and would have to be sustained over decades. Politically, absorbing several million additional migrants from culturally distinct backgrounds would test any government, and Russia’s current regime is not configured to manage that sort of integrationist project.

Policy responses and their limits

Russian policy-makers are well aware of the looming demographic problem. Official documents describe demography as one of the main national security challenges. The Kremlin has tried various measures, mentioned above:

• cash benefits and mortgage subsidies for families with children

• expansion of “maternal capital” payments for second and subsequent children

• rhetorical campaigns praising large families and condemning “child-free” lifestyles

• efforts to reduce abortion and restrict the promotion of contraception

More recently there have been bizarre and deeply controversial initiatives, such as paying schoolgirls and students to have babies and broadcasting a “Mama at 16” television programme lauding teenage motherhood, piloted in the Oryol region. These schemes appear driven by panic rather than coherent social policy.

Demographic experience in Europe and East Asia suggests that successful pro-natalist policies are slow, expensive and tied to broader improvements in the welfare state: affordable housing, reliable childcare, flexible work arrangements and genuine gender equality. Russia’s fiscal and political model, especially under sanctions and wartime mobilisation, leaves little space for such reforms. In addition, prolonged economic stagnation and uncertainty about the future make young families understandably cautious about having more children.

Economic and strategic consequences

Demography is not destiny in any simple sense, but the projected decline in Russia’s population carries clear economic and strategic implications.

A shrinking labour force will drag on growth. The European Bank for Reconstruction and Development estimates that ageing populations could reduce annual GDP per head growth in emerging European economies by roughly 0.4 percentage points between 2024 and 2050. Russia is a prime example of that pattern: a smaller workforce will have to support a larger cohort of pensioners, putting pressure on public finances and the pension system. Raising the retirement age is politically unpopular – as the protests of 2018 showed – yet it may be unavoidable.

From a military perspective, Russia will face increasing difficulty sustaining large-scale land warfare. The pool of draft-age men is shrinking, and the war has already removed a sizeable share of the most motivated and skilled. At the same time, the economy depends more heavily on the remaining working-age men and women to keep industry running and to generate export revenues. Labour shortages in both civilian and defence sectors, already acknowledged by the Labour Ministry, will intensify as retirements accelerate and younger cohorts shrink.

At the geopolitical level, Russia’s demographic trajectory contrasts sharply with that of some neighbours. Although Ukraine has suffered enormous losses and displacement, she retains a younger age structure and can in principle rebuild through Western integration and migration if the war ends favourably. Central Asian states such as Uzbekistan and Tajikistan still enjoy relatively youthful populations and may see growing leverage over a Russia that depends upon them for migrant labour.

Conclusion: a long, slow squeeze

The striking feature of Russia’s population projections is not a sudden collapse but a long, slow squeeze. Barring an unlikely demographic miracle, Russia will move from roughly 144 million inhabitants today to something closer to 135 million by mid-century, with a much larger share of the elderly, fewer workers and a persistent deficit of young families.

That decline is driven by the interaction of four forces:

• sustained low fertility, rooted in economic insecurity and the legacy of the 1990s

• high mortality and fragile public health, exacerbated by COVID-19 and now by war

• ageing and the skewed age structure produced by earlier demographic shocks

• war-related casualties and emigration of skilled, working-age Russians

Policy responses so far have been symbolic and coercive rather than structural, while the war has actively undermined what limited demographic advantages Russia still possessed. In demographic terms, the Russian state is consuming her future to fight in the present. The projections for the coming decades are neither apocalyptic nor reassuring; they depict a great power whose population will slowly ebb away, leaving her older, poorer and less capable of projecting sustained military force.