On the brink of what promises to be a long war, demography – at least as much as the economy – is proving to be a decisive factor for both Ukraine and Russia to hold out in the long term. Having gambled on the best-prepared elements of a supposedly modernized army in the first weeks of his invasion of Ukraine, Vladimir Putin has had to rely on the mass mobilization of his citizens – revealing the immense and long-standing fragilities of Russian demography.
Yet the head of the Kremlin has placed this issue at the heart of his words and actions since his rise to power at the end of 1999. With his costly family support policies, Putin has made strengthening demography a priority, even an obsession. He reiterated it in his address to the nation in 2020: "Russia's destiny and its historical prospects depend on one thing: how many of us there are and how many of us there will be."
Despite the paramount importance of the issue for the authorities, or perhaps precisely because of it, Russian demographic data are shrouded in the utmost vagueness and treated as a government secret – including the basic fact of Russia's overall population. The statistical agency Rosstat, the authority on the subject, estimated the figure at 146,447,424 as of January 1. It's an embarrassing finding for Putin, given that it is less than in 1999.
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