Russia has moved to classify key demographic statistics following a dramatic collapse in its birth rate, which has plunged to levels not seen since the late 18th or early 19th century, according to a leading Russian demographer.
For decades, Russia has been experiencing a plunging birth rate and population decline, which appears to have worsened amid its ongoing invasion of Ukraine—with high casualty rates and men fleeing the country to avoid being conscripted to fight.
Projections estimate that Russia’s population will fall to about 132 million in the next two decades. The United Nations has predicted that in a worst-case scenario, by the start of the next century, Russia’s population could almost halve to 83 million.
…Wow.
So what’s the tankie angle to this? From that perspective, the war is objectively awful for Russia, even if all the stated war goals are true.
The beloved and benevolent putin is merely protecting the country from the overpopulation seen in the west.
The tankie angle is that it’s NATO’s fault. Would never have happened if mean old west hadn’t invaded Ukraine and genocided Russian-speakers who are ethnically and linguistically identical to Ukrainians but also totally different and superior but also must be defended by daddy Vladdy.
And also Ukraine is an inseparable part of Russia, especially Crimea. Khrushchev was only kidding when he gave Crimea to Ukraine, which isn’t a real country.
And the west totally broke its verbal promise that no one’s ever heard to never allow another country into NATO. But The Budapest Memorandum wasn’t worth the paper it was written on. For some reason.
You just don’t understand Russian history. Russia has a very long memory. When it comes to grievances. Theirs.
You’re just russophobic.
I don’t think I’ve ever gotten one of them to even acknowledge the Budapest memorandum.
Though I do like to point out that they’re the biggest western chauvinists ever if they genuinely think NATO somehow forced putin into emptying Russia’s soviet stocks of vehicles and ammo in the most disastrous invasion in recent history.
Right? It makes Afganistan (the Soviet and US one) look like nothing. A calamity doesnt even begin to describe it.
Ugh, you said that way too well.
Still (again, rolling with the reasoning), it’s an existential problem, no matter who’s fault it is or how much of a victim they are or how much fatalism they’ve accepted…
You forgot “only a Russian can understand a Russian”
And Azov battalion. 😐
So what’s the tankie angle to this?
“Sure this news is bad, but what about this non sequitur?”
“see! Putin is pro environment! Less people is better!”
Ah, the Genghis Khan defence. Bold move!
“Can’t have racism if there are no remaining races!”
war is always bad for the working class. nothing new here.
It’s all a consequence of Western decadence, of course.
Tankie angle: Any nation that becomes wealthy has the issue of declining birth rates. Putin is just soooooooooo great of a leader, he made every single Russian a trillionaire over night. Everything is better under Putin. Why can’t you see the objective truth? Russia is better than any other nation. That’s why I live in Europe and never intend to return. I don’t see the problem here. Banned for being a reactionary pig. Give money to me.
The takeaway is that the already catastrophic demographic issues they were facing are becoming pointedly worse because of how they’re conducting the war, amongst other things
Are you really claiming that sending healthy young men into the meat grinder is detrimental to birth rates? No wonder why they need to kidnap Ukranian children.
I don’t think they need to, they just recognized an opportunity to get better children without having to figure out how to make better ones themselves.
Kinda rough to have babies if most of your men are being turned into fertilizer.
Russian meat to sunflower oil pipeline
Invades the breadbasket of Europe, accidentally makes their crops even better.
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I promise you, the last thing on the minds of Russian women in this moment is climate change
I’m a woman, with two kids, they’re not my biological children. I never wanted to have kids but other people are having kids and I figure why not love the kids already here? There’s plenty of kids to go around there’s no need for me to personally make a kid. If the kids are already here we should do as much as we can to make their lives good but if they’re not already here it should stay that way.
100% agreed. If possible, get a rescue kid. (In general, without getting into the nitty gritty details about the adoption processes around the world.)
yeah! that’s what I am thinking too, have been for years now. but at the same time babies are booming in the area (not russia, but east eu) so obviously a lot of people think differently.
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Could you elaborate on running out of water?
Some parts of the globe is going to run out of water, some areas of the globe are about to get way too much of it. You know, climate change and all that.
Well, shit. Hopefully they’re fixing this!
Don’t worry, I check resin codes before recycling. Maybe I should remove the labels though, do you think it’ll help?
it’s this stupid doomerism that thinks that we will run out of drinkable water and start wars.
There’s good science that drinkable water is indeed in danger but the doomers ignore the fact that all of this argues about the price of water not the existance of drinkable water. It’ll be more expensive, but the market will create new technologies to filter and desalite water so eventually it’ll balance out.
In fact, this might be a net good as currently water treatment technology has no investments because water is so plentiful. This means poor regions where water is actually a problem now will get this technology and some balance will be restored to the world.
How is this magic technology going to be freely implemented eveywhere and especially in the poorest parts of the world? You description of the mechanisms of invention and investing does not sound at all like how these things actually works in the world we are living in.
I’m genuinely confused by your question. The same way all technology is being delivered? The bigger research market the cheaper is the product and water treatment is no different.
Our top scientists are not solving water issues because there’s no market for it. African people who go 10km one way to the well don’t have the funding to fund this and in the grand scale of things this is such a small issue that it gains no attention and it’s easier to patch it with temporary solutions and existing inefficient technologies than to invent new stuff.
This is a very well known problem in the charity scene that applies way beyond this water issue and it’s not some secret issue that nobody knows about it.
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According to this…: https://www.chunkerowaterplant.com/news/water-desalination-cost-per-gallon The cost of desalination per gallon of seawater is “approximately $0.005 to $0.01”
I would assume people would figure it’s cheaper to pay that cost than to fight wars over it. Most of the planet is covered in water. Like with food, these resource shortages are largely political. The hardest part is removing these power hungry parasites from power. Immense suffering is endured all because of these few billionaire pieces of radioactive shit.
You’re building a straw man that is unrelated to the issue at hand. Sure rich hoarding and political issues are bad but we will not run out of water. Period.
Context will tell you that we’re talking about losing access to water. If people won’t procreate because they don’t have water, it makes no difference if it’s because we are literally all out of water or if someone else is hoarding it all. In both cases, there’s no access to water.
Tell that to a river that got depleted by half in a decade or two, along with dying sole (edit: soil) around. Either we do something or next generations won’t live well, rich or not
“people are still starving” is an argument so bad as “there is still cancer” and “there are still traffic accidents”. Those issues are not boolean, the are quantifiable and are going down at a very optimistic rate.
Yeah every new technological solution has its associated ecological cost. Some are better than others. Guess which ones are the most profitable.
There’s something called the Kuznets environmental curve that explains this pretty intuitively. It’s an optimistic forecast that I only buy when I’m in a good mood.
Uuuuuuuh what?!?!
Buddy, that stuff falls out of the sky. It may be more scarce in the future, but we’re not going to run out.
Even russian women don’t like russians.
Looks like death rates are up though.
It’s the Russian resistance’s long game: in 10 years, there won’t be enough young people left to send to die at the front, so the war will naturally peter out.
No one wants their children to grow up in a corrupt Oligarchy.
If AI and robots will take over so many jobs, why is a declining birthrate a bad thing, in the long term?
Because current society is built on the assumption that around 4 workers will support 1 person with social benefits like retirement money, healtcare or unemployment benefits. Robots are already used in many factories but don’t pay any of those. The robots will produce goods cheaper than humans, however corporations will own the robots, and still charge you the same price for the goods while receiving a larger margin.
So… you’re saying that… capitalism is the problem???
because all wars are a war of attrition. the country with the largest military or the deepest pockets always wins.
depends on where its decling, if its only like elderly left and the young not reproducing thats would be a problem.
I don’t think ruzies are worried about technologies they can’t even afford.
That’s not unique to Russia. Birth rates in developed nations have been plummeting across the board. The only reason the US was escaping it and hanging out around replacement was because of immigration, and, well, I don’t know if you’ve been keeping up with the news lately, but it seems like that’s going to change.
There’s lots of reasons driving demographic collapse, but I don’t think war is one of them. South Korea is usually heralded as the shining example of demographic collapse because their birth rate is the worst by far, and it generally seems to be the case that as economies becomes more “advanced”, women have less time and supports to focus on motherhood, and so just choose not to have kids. I put advanced in scare quotes because it seems to me that a truly advanced economy wouldn’t footgun itself with rapid demographic collapse. Not to say that the trend shouldn’t be towards a smaller population that will tax the Earth’s resources less, but the way to get there safely for civilization isn’t by falling off a cliff.
Other countries also have the problems with the birth rates, but Putin is accelerating that. Murdering and crippling his young men in a senseless war. Keeping millions of men in the army away from home, far away from their girlfriends. Pushing people to leave the country, if they can. The problem might be there without Putin, but the war is making it so much worse
I have thought long and hard about having a kid. The only positives are some happy moments, my parents getting a grandbaby, and having someone to help make sure I don’t get taken advantage of when I’m old (I believe it is my financial responsibility to plan for myself but I know my brain may decline). Then I think of the negatives. The money, the loss of sleep, the loss of autonomy, the loss of time, it’s just all so so much. My life would get substantially worse.
Then I think about adopting someone older than a baby, and it’s an interesting idea, I don’t feel a need to spread my genes, but it’s the same thing. Then I think maybe adopt a teenager, it’s not as long of a commitment. But by this point it’s such a nasty equation of tradeoffs and I never want a child to be thought of that way. Plus, I really don’t think I have the heart or patience for adopting an older child.
So the only real thing I feel like I’m missing is having someone to make sure I’m not a victim of elder abuse. I’ll just try to keep getting you get friends and keep them close. I’m 33. My youngest close-ish friend is about 22. If I keep making young people my friends then hopefully if I’m in the nightmare scenario of mental decline and my spouse has passed that one of them can check up on me when we’re both old. That seems less shitty than adopting a child for that reason.
If you like working with kids, you could become a Big Brother or Big Sister too. They’ll remember you. ❤️
I’m a parent. I’m not going to try and sell you on having a kid; don’t do it unless you know you want to. What I’m about to say isn’t trying to sell you on parenthood or making apologetics, but just sharing my own personal experience having thought of almost all the same things you’ve thought and then crossed the bridge anyway. I figure that parenting really isn’t about what you get out of it, and you do get stuff out of it- the love, the experience, the ups and downs, someone to depend on and who depends on you. In a lot of ways it’s a microcosm of the human social experience in that you much more personally experience the things that make up existing with others in a society. You don’t necessarily need kids the same way you don’t necessarily need a significant other or a circle of friends, it’s just that humans are, by our nature, social creatures, and we’re almost always better off with richer social connections in our life than not. Yeah, you definitely do lose stuff; take autonomy, it’s kind of similar to how you lose a certain degree of autonomy when you get into a serious long term relationship, only you really shouldn’t break up with your kids if they piss you off. If that tradeoff isn’t for you, that’s cool!
Everybody’s different, but my kids have motivated me to get involved in politics (beyond just voting) at the local level and try to start planting trees whose shade I may never get to enjoy. It made me think hard about the kind of world that we’re leaving to them, and about what responsibility I have as a parent to do what I can to make that world a better place. I don’t expect anything from them; if they move away to live their life, that’s fine, I trust them to use their best judgment and live their life how they see fit, and just knowing that they’re depending on us to do everything we can for them has really motivated me to think differently about things in ways that I believe are generally positive. In case you’re curious about it, you could always try hosting an exchange student. It’s about the lowest commitment way to be a parent to someone, especially since they’re typically older teenagers. If you hate their guts, you can always ask the host organization that they be placed elsewhere. I’ve hosted I think eight exchange kids, and in hindsight, I don’t regret a single instance, even for the kids we didn’t get along with and had to place elsewhere.
yea putin, fuck the world up and then complain that people are not making kids. we will all die in our own filth when the infrastructure collapses and you can wipe your ass with all that money and power
If they classify it, it means it’s a lot worse. Ukraine should send more steriliser over to russia.
Ukraine didn’t cause Russian men to lose their balls, they gave those up willingly.
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he would probably send 70 more million before he admits defeat, probably not. as long as men keep going to the meat grinder he doesnt care.
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Better yet, I would like to see the idea of machismo itself get taken down a peg.
I was permabanned from r/worldnews for this, due to racism, so I’m risking the same here. But there is a theory among armchair historians–which I tend to agree with–that Russians had been targets of regressive selective breeding for the past 450 years. Those who display any kind of individualism or independence (mainly educated, intellectuals, etc) have been selectively eliminated from the gene pool: via exile (best case scenario), or through prisons, labour camps or executions. After centuries of this, the share of independently thinking Russians in Russia is far lower than that of native population in Western European countries.
This is very prominent in science and technology: many of the top inventors weren’t ethnic Russians, but were born or had ancestry in countries that have been under Russian dictate (and regressive evolution) for a much shorter time period. Sergei Korolev, the father of Russian space program was ethnic Hungarian. Russia “boasts” only 15 Nobel laureates in STEM fields since 1917, and only one of them (Nikolay Semyonov) was an ethnic Russian who wasn’t in exile.
All this helps to explain why Russians are so passive in the face of authority. It also points at the fallacy of thinking that we can push them towards accepting western civilization and democracy in the short term. It will take a very long time and a lot of effort to bring them to the moral ideal of Western Europe.
I agree but not in genetic sense but more of a cultural sense imo.
I grew up in Eastern Europe and witnesses soviet collapse and culture shift myself. It went from this obedient “no my problem” passive anger and misery to a society that actually cares for each other and is warm and optimistic which only started to regress recently because of fucking ruskies again.
It’s so frustrating to see this great evil plague the world and pretend that it’s “1 bad putin” when the entire culture has been morphed into facilitating and growing this disgusting evil like rotting bread grows mold.
they have been through centuries of dictatorships, so they technically dont know any better, and its also indoctrination.
i avoided that sub, after gaza/israeli conflict begin after catching a temp ban in '23. too much israeli bots were astrouturfing the subs, and banning people, and your comments are easy misconstrued there.
Wonder where you’re from
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You’re literally rooting for the extinction of an ethnicity. Don’t conflate a people with their government. The folks in the Twin Towers did not deserve to die, regardless of all the horrible things their goverment has done. The folks at the October 7th festival did not deserve to die, regardless of the horrible things their government has done. Russians do not deserve to go extinct, regardless of the horrible things their government has done. Please try to keep your genocidal tendencies in check.
The population are not absolved of responsibility
https://www.kyivpost.com/post/23538
Stop being an enabler.
So you’re saying October 7th was a good thing? And you’re saying that Ukraine deserved to be invaded on account of the 1919 pogroms? I strongly disagree, and I think you’re a ghoul for advocating such things.
Wow. Another illiterate. Learn how to read.
How about you consider that the majority of Israel approves of the treatment of Palestinians, or that in 1919 the pogroms enjoyed popular support, or that the majority of Americans supported the gulf wars. How about you don’t throw bricks when you live in a glass house, you genocidal moron.
Yes yes, “just doing my job, not my fault” https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Superior_orders
You’re talking sbout civiians, dumbass
So are you saying Americans deserved 9/11? Because I disagree with that.
Oh we are now upvoting posts that condemn a whole culture as evil. Very classy Lemmy.
Evil like raping your subordinates on the battlefield or evil like kidnapping children and cultural genocide? Or evil like sit on your hands and allow your rulers to destroy you and world security for hundreds of years?
I wonder would you say the same thing about Nazis in 1940s
Great example, I wouldn’t call the whole of german culture evil because of the third Reich.
I guess we disagree then cause I’d absolute call 1940s German culture evil.
Were they under orders to rape corpses or does that come natural
Fewer Russians is excellent news, not every culture needs to stick around forever.
I wonder whether people would downvote this if it was Nazis in 1940s huh
That’s not a good look…
