Moscow Not Including ‘About 40 Percent’ of Combat Deaths in Official Data about Russian Population as a Whole, Raksha Says

Paul Goble

            Staunton, Jan. 12 – The Russian government isn’t including “about 40 percent” of combat deaths in Ukraine in federal statistics about the Russian population as a whole, Aleksey Raksha says. If it had included them, their total would have been sufficient to depress the latest government life expectancy figure of 73.5 years by several percentage points.

            The Russian authorities have taken this step, the independent Russian demographer says, because they certainly don’t want to highlight the impact combat is having on the Russian population and they are reluctant to add more bad news about demographic processes (t.me/RakshaDemography/2502 reposted at kasparov.ru/material.php?id=65A27FE3A2653

            Two of the other figures that Rosstat has reported involve births and fertility. In 2023, Russians gave birth to only 1.213 million children, the lowest figure for any year since the end of Soviet times; and also in that year, the fertility rate among dropped by two percent from the year before to 1.45 children per woman per lifetime, far below the replacement level of 2.2.