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Mother Russia

RUSSIA

For Russia to remain a great power in the world, the world needs more Russian babies.

At least that’s Russian President Vladimir Putin’s thinking. At numerous recent events, Putin has lauded Russian women and, specifically, Russian mothers.

“Many of our grandmothers and great-grandmothers had seven or eight children, and maybe even more,” he said earlier this year at a Kremlin event, according to the Washington Post. “We should preserve and revive these wonderful traditions.”

Part of this push reflects Putin’s stance in today’s cultural conflicts. As a conservative, he decries feminism and efforts to include LGBTQ people in mainstream Russian society. Many of his supporters share his views.

Russian Orthodox Church leaders, for example, agree with a Putin-backed proposal to ban propaganda that espouses so-called “child-free” ideologies that encourage women to reconsider whether they want to have children, Radio Free Europe wrote.

“Child-free is an ideology … that claims children are not obligatory in life and, more generally, even fosters hatred toward children,” said Fyodor Lukyanov, a church official, according to Russian news outlet TASS. “Such child-hating, people-hating ideologies – particularly child-free – must be banned and equated with extremism since they are destroying our future, our children.”

Plenty of Russians disagree with Putin, too, of course. Plenty have criticized Putin’s policies to curtail women’s access to reproductive care, for example, the Associated Press reported.

Russian women aren’t silent about Putin’s regime, either. They are more critical of the Russian invasion of Ukraine than men and have been central to organizing protests against the war and his repressive policies, the Center for European Policy Analysis wrote.

But there’s a practical side to Putin’s policies.

Russia’s population is on track to fall from between 25 to 50 percent by 2100, down to as low as 74 million people compared with the population of 146 million today, according to United Nations figures cited by the Atlantic Council. That decline would come at the same time that the rest of the world’s population will fall by 20 percent. Those who remain, furthermore, will likely be older, less educated and less likely to be ethnic Russians.

Russia can’t be a great power if its population keeps dropping and underdevelopment, corruption, and sanctions hold back its economy, the American Enterprise Institute noted.

Meanwhile, Western intelligence recently estimated that the Russian army has suffered more than 600,000 casualties since invading Ukraine more than two years ago, with tens of thousands killed.

Many of those, analysts say, were fathers or young men who will never have Russian children now.