Paul Goble
Staunton, Feb. 12 – In St. Petersburg over the course of 2024, there were 13 deaths for every ten births; and in the surrounding Leningrad Oblast, the situation was even more dire: in that region, there were fewer than six births for every 10 deaths, according to Aleksandr Kukushkin, the head of the Petersburg State Statistical Office.
Those overarching figures conceal something even worse: births in St. Petersburg fell from 8.6 per 1000 residents in 2023 to 8.5 per 1000 in 2024, a trend that also occurred in the oblast (https://www.rosbalt.ru/news/2025-02-12/smertnost-v-peterburge-v-2024-godu-znachitelno-prevysila-rozhdaemost-5321923).
Not surprisingly, Kukushkin placed the blame exclusively on the declining size in the cohort of women of prime child-bearing age. It truly has fallen – by 18 percent since 2016 – and plays a major role in the declining number of births. But it doesn’t explain all of that or any of the large and apparently rising number of deaths.
Those figures also and perhaps even more importantly reflect a lack of confidence in the future with regard to birthrates and Putin’s healthcare optimization and sanctions which have left Russians with fewer opportunities to get care or necessary medicines, but pointing to those factors would likely have been politically suicidal for the Petersburg statistics official.
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