“The two-year-old war in Ukraine — which is far from deadlocked — could pivot dramatically in the coming months. U.S. decisions will play a decisive role.” “… Russia and Ukraine could soon be looking at a transformed conflict … in which both have real reasons for hope as well as fear. … Russia’s newly amped-up military strategy heightens the danger […]
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(Moscow Times – April 5, 2024) Russia’s Ministry of Digital Development, Communications and Mass Media said Friday that two-thirds of tech workers who left the country after Moscow’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine in 2022 have returned. “Over the past year, we have not observed an outflow of IT specialists,” the ministry said in a statement, which appeared to have been […]
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(Kennan Institute – wilsoncenter.org/program/kennan-institute – Julia Khrebtan-Hörhager, Associate Professor, Department of Communication Studies, Colorado State University; Evgeniya Pyatovskaya, PhD candidate, Department of Communication Studies, University of South Florida – Feb. 1, 2024) Two years into the war with Ukraine, today’s Russia can best be understood through the lens of a slogan that once appeared in a Solovki special prison, part […]
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“Babies are an increasingly rare sight in a society that prizes family above all but now has the world’s lowest birthrate, throwing the country’s very survival into question.” “Ukraine [reportedly] now has the lowest total fertility rate in the world … an average of 0.7 children per woman of child-bearing age …. This lack of children, compounded by mass violent […]
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(Russia Matters – russiamatters.org – Simon Saradzhyan – Jan. 11, 2024) Since December, my colleagues at Russia Matters and I have been monitoring1 how Ukraine’s President Volodymyr Zelenskyy and its commander-in-chief Valerii Zaluzhnyi have sparred over who should assume prime responsibility for the plan to conscript up to 500,000 Ukrainians. As we watched the two employ what Sun Tzu would […]
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(Moscow Times – Dec. 5, 2023) Two in five Russians who fled the country in the months following Moscow’s invasion of Ukraine have since returned home, the pro-Kremlin newspaper Izvestia reported Tuesday, citing data from an immigration support company and job recruitment website. According to official statistics, 668,400 Russians left the country last year as war broke out in neighboring […]
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(Russia Matters – russiamatters.org) 3 Things to Know In the past month, Russian forces have gained 16 square miles of Ukrainian territory, while Ukraine gained 7 square miles, according to calculations by Katherine Davidson, associate of the Belfer Russia-Ukraine War Task Force.1Yet, Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky has this week denied his top general Valery Zaluzhny’s recent claim that the war has reached […]
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“With so much in the war against Russia hinging on refilling the ranks of soldiers, efforts are underway to draw more Ukrainian women into the army.” “… [F]ighting in Ukraine has bogged down in vicious battles of attrition along a zigzag [southeastern] front line …. [S]teady suppl[ies] of weapons and personnel are crucial … Ukraine … benefit[s] [from] … Western-donated […]
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(Paul Goble – Window On Eurasia – Staunton, Mar. 17, 2023) Censuses, if they are conducted in a good way, can provide information critically needed by both the government and the population, Aleksey Raksha says. “But in Russia after the collapse of the USSR, they haven’t been and the 2021 census was the most badly conducted in the entire history […]
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“A demographic tragedy is unfolding in Russia. Over the past three years the country has lost around 2m more people than it would ordinarily have done, as a result of war, disease and exodus. The life expectancy of Russian males aged 15 fell by almost five years, to the same level as in Haiti. The number of Russians born in […]
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(Paul Goble, Window On Eurasia – Staunton, Feb. 9, 2023) In December 2021, 20 percent of Russians said they would like to live and work abroad, a percentage that fell to 15 or 16 percent in December of 2022, according to Russian and international polls. But in both cases, the share wanting to do so was only about half of […]
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(Paul Goble – Window On Eurasia – Staunton, Dec. 12, 2022) For the last seven months, the number of Russians dying every 30 days has stabilized, allowing the country’s life expectancy to recover from its pandemic lows; but the number being born has continued to fall catastrophically, pushing the total population of the country down faster than anywhere in the […]
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“The Russian army’s strangely stumble-footed invasion of Ukraine is only the latest reminder of the pervasive and long-standing ‘human resource’ woes that frustrate … Putin’s aspirations for superpower status. … Russia is depopulating — even after Putin’s annexation of Crimea in 2014, its total numbers are lower today than when the Soviet Union collapsed. Russia’s working-age population and its pool […]
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When a group of researchers commissioned a poll on Russians’ attitudes toward the war in Ukraine, 29,400 of the 31,000 people they called “ended the conversation as soon as they heard the topic” […]
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(Russia Matters – russiamatters.org – Alexandra Vacroux – Dec. 21, 2021) Alexandra Vacroux is executive director of the Davis Center for Russian and Eurasian Studies and a lecturer on government at Harvard University. Demography plays a starring role in Russia’s dreams and nightmares. Meeting with schoolchildren in Vladivostok on Sept. 1, Russian President Vladimir Putin asserted that had it not […]
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(Paul Goble – Window On Eurasia – Staunton, Oct. 10, 2021) The number of scholars and associated personnel working in the natural sciences has fallen to the lowest level in at least ten years, with the total number employed down a third from the number at the end of Soviet times, according to a new Higher School of Economics study. […]
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“… Russia’s population has been in near-constant decline since the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991, due to a low birth rate, an under-resourced healthcare system, and emigration. The coronavirus pandemic, which has killed at least 400,000 people in Russia according to the national statistic agency Rosstat, has seriously aggravated the problem. … This week the country set a […]
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Russia’s natural population underwent its largest peacetime decline in recorded history over the last 12 months, an analysis of official government statistics has shown.
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Russia’s government has approved measures aimed at halving the number of abortions carried out in the country before 2025, according to a document published on its website […]
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With declining economic trends exacerbated by the pandemic, poor, rural areas are facing a demographic crisis […]
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(Paul Goble – Window On Eurasia – Staunton, July 7, 2021) Russia has significantly reduced the number of abortions over the last several decades both in absolute terms and relative to the number of live births, experts at the HSE’s Institute of Demography say. But Russian officials have changed the way such events are classified without consulting specialists thus making […]
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The number of scientists and highly qualified specialists leaving Russia has risen fivefold in nearly a decade, Russia’s Academy of Sciences (RAS) said […]
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… Russia’s government estimates … the country’s population decline hit a 15-year high in 2020, driven by record-setting excess deaths and outmigration linked to Covid-19 border closures […]
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Rosstat reports that the population of the Russian Federation fell by an estimated 510,000, the largest number in many years […]
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The [official] statistical data indicates that the Russian population reduced by 510,500 over the past year […]
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… [A]lmost 60 percent of Russians below … thirty view developments in Russia negatively and were on average against [Putin’s 2020 amendments to Constitution] … according to the Levada Center […]
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… That pattern, [a] Levada Center sociologist says, reflects … the very different experiences of the two generations and the inability of the Putin government to find a common language with the rising generation … a threat to the stability of the regime […]
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President Vladimir Putin has urged the government to improve abortion prevention strategies in an effort to reduce the number of terminated pregnancies and offset Russia’s population decline […]
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“Russia’s population is expected to decline by 325,500 people this year – 11 times more than in 2019 (when the number of Russians fell by just 32,100 people) – according to the latest government projections, first leaked by the Telegram channel Maisky Ukaz and later confirmed by sources who spoke to the news outlet RBC. The estimated population loss in […]
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Subject: What Do Siberian Millennial and the Perestroika Generation Professionals Have in Common? Date: Thu, 8 Oct 2020 From: Sarah Lindemann-Komarova <echosiberia@gmail.com> What Do Siberian Millennial and the Perestroika Generation Professionals Have in Common? By Sarah Lindemann-Komarova [Sarah Lindemann-Komarova has been a community development activist in Siberia since 1992] With photos: medium.com/@ECHOSiberia/what-do-siberian-millennial-and-perestroika-generation-professionals-have-in-common-ff4a74fc7658 After a six hour drive, the designer cocktail […]
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(Paul Goble – Window on Eurasia – Staunton, Sept. 25, 2020) The fertility rate in Russia fell last year to 1.504 children per woman per lifetime, far below the replacement level of 2.1, below the figure of 1.579 of a year earlier, and below the Kremlin’s projected goal for last year of 1.63. In fact, the 2019 figure was the […]
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(Moscow Times – themoscowtimes.com – Sept. 2, 2020) Russia’s population could see its biggest decline in 14 years in 2020 as the coronavirus pandemic has raised the country’s death rate amid falling birth rates, according to government forecasts reported by the RBC news website Tuesday. The Covid-19 outbreak will also push Russia’s poverty rate up from 12.3% in 2019 to […]
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The “Putin Generation” (… Russians from 17 to 25) … just about 9% of the overall Russian population … [is] Russia’s first entirely post-Soviet generation and the first … to grow up with the Internet […]
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“President Vladimir Putin has been trying for years to push Russia’s birthrate higher, but the economic fallout from the coronavirus pandemic is undermining his efforts” “… The Kremlin has been trying for years to encourage Russians to have more children. … Putin sees replenishing … population as … key to expanding Russia’s economic and political power. But … falling incomes […]
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“A new study has revealed … a 14,000-year-old tooth belonging to a close cousin of today’s Native Americans … thousands of kilometers from the landmass that once connected Eurasia and the Americas. … suggest[ing] the Siberian ancestors of North America’s Indigenous peoples were more widespread and mobile …. Sometime about 20,000 years ago, people began to cross the eastern tip […]
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(Moscow Times – themoscowtimes.com – April 21, 2020) Russians’ average life expectancy reached a historic record of 73.4 years in 2019, the country’s Health Ministry was quoted by Interfax as saying Tuesday. The increase from 2018, when average life expectancy stood at a little over 73 years, is attributed to a 3.5% decrease in male mortality and a 2.1% decrease […]
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(Article text ©2020 RFE/RL, Inc., Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty – rferl.org – Irina Fokina, Robert Coalson – SEVERODVINSK, Russia, February 9, 2020 – article text also appeared at rferl.org/a/despite-putin-s-promises-many-large-russian-families-feel-abandoned-by-the-state/30424839.html) Natalia Golubtsova and her husband, Sergei Kirillov, are raising their six children in a cramped, two-room apartment in a Brezhnev-era building in this city in Russia’s Far North. When their third […]
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“Russia’s population declined for a second year in a row in 2019, Rosstat’s preliminary estimate reveals. An increase in migration failed to make up for the dwindling natural population, which fell by 286,000 in the first 11 months of 2019. On the whole, Russia’s population dropped almost 36,000 … [after a] nearly 100,000-person decline in 2018. Rosstat’s demographic forecast predicts […]
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“Ukraine’s population fell behind that of Poland … [with] an electronic census reveal[ing] the number of citizens … dropped by … 5mn … 37.289mn since the last census in 2000. Poland’s population was 37.98mn in 2018, according to Eurostat. The … Ukrainian number does not include … Crimea or [the] Donbass regions, which would add roughly another million …. The […]
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(Moscow Times – themoscowtimes.com – December 13, 2019) Russia’s natural population decline will set an 11-year record this year as the country’s demographic crisis shows no signs of letting up, the RBC news website reported Friday. Russia’s overall population totaled 146.7 million in January-September 2019, the State Statistics Service Rosstat said in a report last week. While migrant inflows had […]
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(Paul Goble – Window on Eurasia – Staunton, Nov. 28, 2019) What is happening in the Russian North recalls to mind an old Soviet joke in which Hitler returns from the dead to watch a Soviet military parade in Red Square. After he has watched this display of military might, he is approached by a Soviet citizen who says, “I […]
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(Kennan Institute – wilsoncenter.org/program/kennan-institute – Arbakhan Magomedov – Nov. 14, 2019) Arbakhan Magomedov is visiting professor at the Russian State University for the Humanities. (RSUH). His fieldwork in the Far North was done as part of the project “Rising Voices of Northern Indigenous People in the Context of Growing Pressure of Russian Nationalism,” for which he received financial support through […]
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(Paul Goble – Window on Eurasia – Staunton, Oct. 22, 2019) It is common ground that official Russian statistics are often at odds with reality, but that divergence has seldom been the subject of academic research. Now, Olga Molyarenko of the Higher School of Economics has filled that gap with a study based on 270 in-depth interviews with officials at […]
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(Paul Goble – Window on Eurasia – Staunton, September 30, 2019) Fertility rates in Russia have again fallen to the levels they were in during the 1990s, Rosstat data show, and the government assumes that when the deceive economy improves, they will go right back up. But a more careful examination of the data suggests that underlying shifts in values […]
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“Russia remains a nation of heavy drinkers, but alcohol consumption has fallen 43 percent from 2003 to 2016, a key factor in the country’s rapid rise in life expectancy, the World Health Organization said …. Russians consume the equivalent of 11-12 liters worth of pure ethanol a year, among the world’s highest consumption levels, but the reduction since 2003 has […]
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(Moscow Times – themoscowtimes.com – September 24, 2019) The average woman in Russia gets married eight years later than she did earlier this decade, according to official data. Marriage rates in Russia hit their lowest point since 2000 last year, according to Federal Statistics Service (Rosstat) data, and researchers don’t expect rates to begin rising again until the mid-2020s. Most […]
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(Russia Matters – russiamatters.org – Daniel Shapiro, Natasha Yefimova-Trilling – September 13, 2019) Last week, in a meeting with top advisors, Russian President Vladimir Putin lamented the population decline in the country’s Far East, saying it falls in an “alarming, red zone.” While this sparsely populated region, which shares a border with far more densely populated Chinese provinces, may raise […]
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(Paul Goble – Window on Eurasia – Staunton, July 23, 2019) Many Russians were pleased that the demise of the Soviet Union meant that the rapidly growing Muslim populations of the Central Asian republics were beyond the state borders of the Russian Federation and thus would no longer be a brake on the desire of Russians for development and even […]
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(Moscow Times – themoscowtimes.com – July 3, 2019) Russia’s population numbers are declining “catastrophically” with several regions vastly underestimating their death rates, a top government official has said. Russia has struggled with a demographic crisis in recent years, with population numbers falling for the first time in a decade to 146.8 million last year. Official data for 2019 places Russia’s […]
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“… For more than 33 million Russians under age 20, the leadership of Putin is the only type of government they’ve ever known. Putin succeeded Boris Yeltsin as president in 2000. Since then he’s bounced between the offices of president and prime minister, most recently barring Navalny from running against him in the 2018 presidential elections. … young Russians … […]
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