By Murad Rakhimov | 2025-02-07

TASHKENT -- Russia was experiencing a demographic crisis long before the start of the war in Ukraine, but it has become especially acute amid Russia's troop losses since the full-scale aggression began in 2022.

For several years, calls to urgently raise the birth rate have been sounding from even the highest platforms in Russia.

"The general trend persists of declining birth rates, postponing marriage and having children. We must reverse this negative trend," Russian President Vladimir Putin said December 20 during a State Council meeting on the support of families.

The day before, Putin also addressed the birth rate on the year-end live television event "Itogi Goda." After noting that the number of women of childbearing age in Russia had dropped by 30% (without specifying the time frame), he implored, "We need girls!"

Battle for 'traditional values'

Young women who have never given birth are the new target of the Kremlin's propaganda machine, which is continuing the battle for "traditional values" that it launched several years ago.

The government now has turned its attention to women attending universities, who account for 50.7% of the student population. It has in mind both undergraduates and graduate students.

In the autumn of 2023, there were 27,700 Russian women attending university who already had children, according to government statistics.

That number is a drop in the bucket compared to enrollment of more than 2 million women in Russian universities.

Officials throughout Russia are trying to enact financial and social policies favoring families headed by students.

A new federal program called "Family" is scheduled to take effect this year. Local authorities continue to report on the institution of new incentive payments.

In Krasnoyarsk, female students up to the age of 23 are promised 100,000 RUB (€980) for having a child. The Karelia regional government previously announced it would hand out 100,000 RUB provided that the woman is a Russian citizen attending classes in person.

Ulyanovsk and Khabarovsk provinces are considering the possibility of issuing payments to female students, Forbes.ru reported in December. In Oryol and Tomsk provinces, prospective parents will be able to receive payment for a firstborn child even before giving birth.

Perm province decided not to put any age limit on payments to child-bearing female students. There, the wives of troops fighting in Ukraine are also eligible for benefits. They are promised 134,000 RUB (€1,313) for every baby they bear.

"Those families are probably producing genuine patriots, not scientists, engineers or programmers who are of no need to anyone," Sergei Chernyshov, a historian whom the Kremlin has labeled a "foreign agent," said in a sarcastic monologue that Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty posted on YouTube in December.

The 100,000 RUB that various local governments are promising to pay student-mothers is equal to the minimum fine for spreading "child-free propaganda" -- ideas about the voluntary, conscious choice to go childless.

Putin signed the law criminalizing pro-childlessness rhetoric November 23.

Holding governors responsible

In 2023, 1.264 million children were born in Russia, which means 8.7 births per 1,000 individuals -- the lowest birth rate in 24 years, Kommersant reported last February, citing the Russian government.

Last June, the birth rate fell even more: to 98,600 children that month, the level during the 1998 global crisis. Before last June, the number of births per month generally did not dip below 100,000.

At the same time, the country is seeing a rising natural population decline: in the first half of 2024, the population fell by 321,500 -- 49,000 more than during the same period in 2023.

Trying to stop the population's death spiral, Putin has demanded the evaluation of governors based on their provinces' fertility rate.

Governors and other provincial officials risk dismissal and blacklisting if their provinces produce too few children.

'3 kids is a fantasy'

Many factors influence a couple's decision whether to have children, and government incentives are unlikely to make an impact, analysts say.

The decision to have a first child depends on various motivations: cultural and social factors impervious to most external incentives, Russian demographer Alexey Raksha told Kontur.

However, "economic factors play a major role in whether families have a second, third or fourth child. They include income and the Gini index, which measures inequality," he said.

"What's much more helpful are sizable one-time payments that seed a budget for motherhood and are roughly equal to the cost of an additional room in a home."

"Three kids is a fantasy. That was what Russia had 80 to 100 years ago," Raksha said. "About 55 years ago, Russian families already had stopped having more than two kids."

The war factor

For now, the demographic situation is not expected to change, said Stanislav Pritchin, director of the Central Asia department of the National Research Institute of World Economy and International Relations of the Russian Academy of Sciences.

"Right now it's people who were born in the 1990s who are of reproductive age. There are fewer of them than there were on average [in the preceding generation] from year to year, which means that Russia is dealing with a demographic slump," Pritchin told Kontur. "The government needs to look for mechanisms to help push the birth rate up."

Experience around the world shows that economic stimuli do not always boost the birth rate. For example, countries like South Korea and Japan have failed for decades to raise their birth rate despite offering various incentives.

Some Russian city dwellers have a standard of living similar to that in European countries. Keeping that standard of living becomes easier if they stop at one child.

The main cause of the demographic crisis is the small 1990s generation, a Russian historian, ethnologist and anthropologist told Kontur on the condition of anonymity.

"Of course, there is another factor: the echoes of war [in Ukraine]," the scholar said. "Many [Russians] have left the country, gone to the front or been drafted. Society is experiencing uncertainty. People are putting off having kids."