Russia wants more babies

For a quarter century, President Vladimir Putin has faced the specter of Russia's shrinking and ageing population.

In 1999, a year before he came to power, the number of babies born in Russia plunged to its lowest recorded level. In 2005, Putin said the demographic woes needed to be resolved by maintaining "social and economic stability".

In 2019, he said the problem still "haunted" the country.

As recently as Thursday, he told a Kremlin demographic conference that increasing births was "crucial" for Russia.

Putin has launched initiatives to encourage people to have more children -- from free school meals for large families to awarding Soviet-style "hero-mother" medals to women with 10 or more children.

"Many of our grandmothers and great-grandmothers had seven, eight, and even more children," Putin said in 2023. "Let's preserve and revive these wonderful traditions. Having many children and a large family must become the norm."

At first, births in Russia grew with its economic prosperity, from 1.21 million babies born in 1999 to 1.94 million in 2015.

But those hard-won gains are crumbling against a backdrop of financial uncertainty, the war in Ukraine, an exodus of young men, and opposition to immigration.

Russia's population has fallen from 147.6 million in 1990 -- the year before the USSR collapsed -- to 146.1 million this year, according to Russia's Federal Statistics Service. Since the 2014 annexation of Crimea, it has included the peninsula's population of about two million, as well as births and deaths there, in its data.

,The population also is significantly older. In 1990, 21.1 per cent was 55 or older, government data said. In 2024, that figure was 30 per cent.

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 -- marginally above the 1999 low. Demographer Alexei Raksha reported that the number of babies born in Russia in February 2025 was the lowest monthly figure in over two centuries