Russian President Vladimir Putin has asked families to produce at least two children if Russians wanted to preserve their identities.
Addressing employees at a tank factory in the Ural region, Putin said that having two children per family was the minimum for the nation’s ethnic survival.
“If we want to survive as an ethnic group – well, or as ethnic groups inhabiting Russia – there must be at least two children. If each family had just one child, the population would shrink, he said. “And in order to expand and develop, you need at least three children,” he added.
Moscow has suffered over 300,000 casualties in the ongoing war in Ukraine. Thousands of people have fled the country for the fear of being called up to fight. In March 2023, the Economist reported that “Over the past three years the country has lost around 2 million more people than it would ordinarily have done, as a result of war in Ukraine, and streaming exodus.”
This is not the first time Putin has asked women to have more children. In November 2023, Putin urged women to have as many as eight children. He had then said that the “ethnic groups have preserved the tradition of having strong multigenerational families with four, five, or even more children. Let us remember that Russian families, many of our grandmothers and great-grandmothers had seven, eight, or even more children.”
Since the fall of the erstwhile Soviet Union, Russia has been suffering over two decades of gradual decline in population.
The state statistics bureau estimated the population at 146.4 million at the start of 2023, down from nearly 149 million 20 years earlier, but up from a low of about 143 million between 2007 and 2012.
This shortage has led to severe workforce shortage and an increasing economic slowdown amid the ongoing sanctions that have been imposed in the wake of the Ukraine War.
Many believe that Putin is obsessed with demographic change, French demographer Laurent Chalard told the Financial Times that “ In his mind, the power of a country is linked to the size of its population. The larger the population, the more powerful the state.”
