Two Demographic Trends in Russia Coming Together to Limit Putin’s Ability to Wage the Kind of War He has Conducted Up to Now

Paul Goble

            Staunton, Dec. 1 – Two tectonic demographic shifts in Russian society – ever lower fertility rates and ever greater divorce rates – are now coming together in ways that will inevitably the ability of Vladimir Putin to be able to wage aggressive wars that rely on mass armies.

            On the one hand, falling fertility rates mean that the size of the draft pool is declining: Russian society is simply producing ever fewer people in the prime draft age cohorts, making it more difficult to raise a mass army, and these declines mean that ever more families have only one or two children making the potential loss even more difficult to bear.

            And on the other, rising divorce rates mean that ever more children are growing up in single-parent households, not only being the object of even more intense attention from their only parent than many are from two but also increasingly the source of income either from jobs or government subsidies. Losing such a child is thus certain to spark more resistance.

            Other countries have wrestled with this problem and there are ways around it, the most prominent being to shift away from mass armies to smaller professional ones and to avoid conflicts where mass armies are required either as the primary aggressive force or to suppress populations in occupied areas.

            But the Russian authorities have generally appeared to believe that they can continue to act as they always have, as if larger families and two-parent households are the overwhelming norm rather than being as the first is increasingly rare and the second ever less of the norm it once was.

            Two new protests, one by mothers of single sons (t.me/mobilizationnews/4633) and a second by single parents (владимиру-путину.рф/), are now highlighting this problem and prompting discussion of the ways in which demography may affect policy now and in the future (sibreal.org/a/materi-umolyayut-putina-ne-otnimat-u-nih-edinstvennyh-synovey/32153875.html).

            As Putin’s war in Ukraine grinds on toward its first anniversary, ever more families are going to face losses; and so what has been an issue confined mostly to demographers and economists up to now is likely to become a broader political question, possibly sparking demands for an end to the war or at a minimum a radical change in the way it is being fought.