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Russia's population time bomb. [1]

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Date: 2024-06-12  

Russia is a large nation, with a population several times that of Ukraine.

But in trying to rebuild his imagined Russian Empire, Putin may have doomed Russia to irrelevance for years to come.

While estimates range widely, the high end of estimates claim that perhaps as many as several million Russians have left the country since the war began. Even low estimates put the numbers in the hundreds of thousands.

And yes, Russia has a sizable population, but… the demographics don’t work out in Russia’s favor long-term.

For one, in 2021, Russia was recording just 9.6 births for every 17 deaths. The average age in Russia is 40.7 years old — compared to 34.9 years old in 1990. Russia’s population is aging, and is not anywhere near to being replaced by the recent birthrate.

And now comes Putin’s war, resulting in, so far, at least several hundred thousand Russian soldiers killed or maimed, many of them younger men (yes, we see lots of pictures of conscripts with beer bellies and gray hair, but let’s face it — most of Russia’s conscripts are relatively young). Taking these men out of the gene pool isn’t going to help Russia’s aging population or birthrate issue. And many of those fleeing Russia are men of conscription age, further bleeding Russia of it’s “breeding stock.”

Oh...did I mention that the life expectancy of Russian men is only 68.57 years, even before the war started? And that males only make up 46.5 percent of the total population?

Putin is sitting on a population time bomb. Remember, Russia’s main tactic is artillery barrages followed by “meat waves” of troops, hoping to wear down and overwhelm the opponent by sheer numbers. If Russians are dying at twice the rate they’re being born, how much longer will it be before this tactic isn’t viable anymore? A decade? Two? Is it even really viable now? (Russia has a massive labor shortage back home because of the war and also the exodus of workers out of the country. Every conscripted soldier is one less worker to assemble tanks and bombs, work on extracting oil and gas, or even manufacturing basic necessities. Remember how bad the response to the water main breaks in Russia was this past winter? That sort of thing isn’t going to improve.)

Is this going to collapse Russia next week or next month? No. But it’s one more problem, and a long-term one, that Putin and Russia are facing, and possibly an unsolvable one. About the only solution is for Putin to continue grabbing territory and then conscripting the civilians from those captured areas (which Russia has already been doing — another war crime). But that assumes that Russia can capture territory faster than it can be evacuated, and that there are more conscripts to be had in that territory than it took in losses to capture it. Given Russia’s losses of about a thousand men per day for very little to show for it, that seems pretty unlikely. They’d need a sudden and unexpected breakthrough of substantial proportions. In this age of drone surveillance, that seems very unlikely unless Ukraine makes a massive error on the battlefield.

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[1] Url: https://www.dailykos.com/stories/2024/6/12/2246215/-Russia-s-population-time-bomb?pm_campaign=front_page&pm_source=trending&pm_medium=web

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