Numerous factors have been floated to explain Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine in 2022, including NATO’s expansion in Eastern Europe and a desire to restore Soviet-era might.
But Ivan Krastev, chair of the Center for Liberal Strategies in Bulgaria, and Stephen Holmes, a law professor at New York University, argue President Vladimir Putin’s obsession with Russia’s demographic decline may be the key.
In an analysis in Foreign Policy magazine on Dec. 6, they drew a parallel with “mourning wars” during the 17th and 18th centuries, when Native American tribes kidnapped women and children from other tribes to offset losses from wars or disease.
“In many ways, it resembles an updated version of such a war, a desperate attempt to replenish a dwindling population by forcibly incorporating a neighboring people into Russia’s own,” Krastev and Holmes wrote. “While the invasion was undoubtedly sparked by imperialist ambitions, anti-Western resentment, and a desire for Great Power recognition, it may also have been conditioned by Russia’s rapidly shrinking, aging, and emigrating population.”
(For his part, Putin has made false claims of a “neo-Nazi regime” in Ukraine, which is led by a Jewish president, as his reason for invading.)
Russia has been tending toward a demographic crisis for years, prompting the Kremlin to try boosting fertility by offering tax breaks and expanding childcare for low-income families.
But that hasn’t prevented the birth rate from hitting its lowest level in the past 25 years. Combined with recent war casualties and a related exodus of young people, the population is falling at an alarming rate.
It currently sits at about 146 million, down from 148 million in the early 1990s, and the United Nations has predicted it could collapse to 74 million to 112 million by 2100.
This has been top of mind for Putin, even before he launched his war on Ukraine. In a 2021 speech to Russian schoolchildren, he preached the necessity of growing the population, which he views as more critical to national security than landmass.
“Putin understands that, in the world of tomorrow, Russia will be a territorial giant and population dwarf,” Krastev and Holmes said.
Tellingly, Russia’s war on Ukraine has involved the mass abduction of children, who are adopted by Russian parents, they point out.
After failing to boost Russia’s fertility rate via pronatalist policies and to extend life expectancies, Putin “seems to have concluded that the only way to achieve a sizable increase in his population is by annexing and subordinating ethnically and culturally related neighbors, by force if necessary.”
Putin also sees a larger population as necessary to exploit the natural resources in the Arctic that are becoming more accessible from climate change, Krastev and Holmes added.
Meanwhile, he views Western feminism and LGBTQ-friendly policies as the causes of Russia’s shrinking population and as part of a conspiracy to make the country childless, they explained.
To be sure, other countries, especially in the developed world, are experiencing low birth rates and slower population growth or outright declines. In Japan, for example, Tokyo’s municipal government is turning to a four-day workweek and partial childcare leave to encourage people to have more babies.
And as bad as Russia’s demographic trends look, Ukraine is in even worse shape, potentially influencing how and when Kyiv might approach an end to the fighting, according to Krastev and Holmes.
But even when the war ends, it could be followed by similar conflicts elsewhere.
“The population loss experienced by historically dominant groups seems to be preparing the way for an upheaval of end-times aggression, inflamed by a primal fear of national extinction,” they warned.
