Asked what keeps him up at night, Vladimir Putin identified a problem: Russia’s population decline and the threat it poses to the country’s economy.
At a press conference last November, while massing troops on the Ukrainian border, the Russian president said the country’s birth rate had dropped during World War II and also in the early 1990s, after the fall of the Soviet Union, which caused a deficit in the workforce.
“From a humanitarian and economic point of view and from the perspective of strengthening our nation, the demographic problem is one of the most important ones,” he added.
But the invasion of Ukraine has compounded the problem. The war has sparked an exodus of educated professionals and is likely to produce thousands of deaths, many of them young people expected to contribute to the economy for decades to come, adding to the impact of the coronavirus pandemic, during which there were 1 million deaths beyond normal levels.
These challenges, amid crippling Western-imposed sanctions that could push Russia into its deepest recession since the early 1990s, threaten to create a lasting economic turmoil in the country that could encourage people to have fewer children.
“With this insane conflict, Putin is shooting himself in the foot. The biggest losses will not come from the conflict, but from a deep economic crisis in Russia,” said Ilia Kashnitski, an assistant professor at the Interdisciplinary Center on Population Dynamics in Denmark.
In a sign that Russia fears a war-related brain drain, the government last month exempted young tech workers from conscription, offered discounted mortgage rates and exempted IT companies from income tax and inspections, as well as securing their access to cheap loans.
Russian leadership expected the tech sector to accelerate economic development and, more recently, support post-pandemic recovery. But Russia has suffered a massive brain drain in the technology sector since the start of the war in late February.
In the next four weeks, between 50,000 and 70,000 workers in the sector left the country, a director of the sector association said in March in a report to a Russian parliamentary committee. Another 70,000 to 100,000 people are likely to leave in April, said Sergei Plugotarenko, head of the Russian Association for Electronic Communications, according to state news agency Interfax. “Clearly there is emigration at a scale and pace that we have never seen,” said independent demographer Alexei Rakcha.
Jean-Christophe Dumont, director of the OECD’s division of international migration, said the volume of people leaving Russia earlier was not a source of concern to the government. “This situation is now certainly changing the game, and a number of countries are seizing the opportunity.”
Israel has created an easier “green route” for refugees from Ukraine and Russia. “Since the beginning of the war, almost as many Russians as Ukrainians have moved to Israel,” Dumont said. He added that Israel is targeting people working in robotics, aeronautics and nanotechnology.
Putin tried to increase Russia’s population. In February, a Russian lawmaker said the country had provided 770,000 passports to people in the contested Donbass region, according to state news agency Tass. But Russia is losing many of those educated and wealthy enough to leave, at a time when it has been hit by the pandemic.
More than 1 million people died in Russia between March 2020 and January 2022 beyond the expected number, based on trends in the same period between 2015 and 2019, according to an analysis of government data by the Financial Times. This number is much higher than Russia’s official death toll from Covid – 360,000 – and is among the highest levels of excess mortality of any country.
A deep distrust of vaccines produced in the country was widely cited as the reason for the low acceptance of immunizers. According to Dumont, the government’s refusal to apply mRNA vaccines, in favor of the less effective ones produced in Russia, contributed to emigration. “Many decided to settle in OECD countries because they didn’t want to go back and get the Sputnik vaccine,” he said.
Beyond the pandemic, the economic impact of the brain drain and sanctions is likely to exacerbate the underlying downward trend in the fertility rate in coming years, according to population experts. Economists fear income could fall as much as 12% to 15%.
“I don’t see much support coming from this administration,” said economist Elina Ribakova, deputy director of the Institute of International Finance in Washington. “They will focus on rebuilding reserves, rebuilding protections, then military spending.”
The decade following the fall of the Soviet Union was marked by a sharp decline in births. As a result, there are relatively few Russians in their 20s and 30s, which heralds a further decline in the population. Demographers generally agree that a country’s population can only grow without net immigration if couples have at least 2.1 children on average. Russia, like many developed economies, has fertility rates far below this.
The economic setback caused by the war will be felt in the fertility rate towards the beginning of next year, according to Raksha. This means that Putin, through the invasion he ordered, is likely to have the protracted demographic crisis he feared. “The total fertility rate – the number of children the average woman has – could drop by 10% in the next year or two due to falling incomes,” said Raksha, who expects a “collapse” in 2023 unless it is a substantial incentive program was launched.
“People are just starting to feel that they might lose their jobs, that everything has gotten more expensive while wages haven’t increased.”
