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In 1999, a year before President Vladimir Putin came to power, the number of babies born in Russia plunged to its lowest level.
The Associated Press reports that in 2005, he said the demographic woes needed to be resolved by maintaining “social and economic stability.”
In 2019, he said the problem still “haunted” the country.
Ha has launched initiatives to encourage people to have more children. He offered free school meals for large families and awarded Soviet-style “hero-mother” medals to women with ten or more children.
Initially, births in Russia grew with economic prosperity, from 1.21 million babies born in 1999 to 1.94 million in 2015. However, those gains are crumbling against a backdrop of financial uncertainty, the war in Ukraine, an exodus of young men and opposition to immigration.
The country’s population has fallen from 147.6 million in 1990 to 146.1 million this year, according to Russia’s Federal Statistics Service. Since the 2014 illegal annexation of Crimea, it has included the peninsula’s population of about 2 million, as well as births and deaths there, in its data.
The population is significantly older. In 1990, 21.1 % was 55 or older, according to government data. In 2024, that figure was 30%.
Since the 2015 peak, the number of births has fallen annually, and deaths are now outpacing births. There were only 1.22 million live births last year. Demographer Alexei Raksha reported the number of babies born in Russia in February 2025 was the lowest monthly figure in over two centuries.
Russia is trying new restrictions to halt the backslide and embrace what it calls “traditional family values” with laws banning the promotion of abortion and “child-free ideology” and outlawing all LGBTQ+ activism.
In the government’s view, women might be financially independent, but they should be “willing and very excited to take up this additional work of reproduction in the name of patriotism and Russian strength,” a Russian feminist scholar said.
