Russia knows it has a problem with manpower, which is getting worse.
Who will keep the country going?
"Norma Cohen JUNE 24 2022
The writer is the FT’s former demography correspondent
"Despite the vast combat operation currently under way in Ukraine, the Kremlin has refrained from a full military mobilisation and refused to admit that it is at war. There are plenty of strategic reasons for this decision, but an underlying demographic weakness may also be partly to blame: Russia has been producing too few babies since the 1991 collapse of the Soviet Union to even keep its population stable, let alone build up an army...
The data for Russia indicates that its total fertility rate fell to about 1.3 babies per woman aged 15 to 44 in the early 1990s, according to the Max Planck Institute for Demographic Research. To maintain a stable population, the national average needs to be closer to 2.1 babies. Other nations falling below this threshold include China and several countries across central and eastern Europe, including Ukraine — which has barred men aged 18 to 60 from leaving the country since the invasion.
Moscow has tried to reverse the falling birth rate, including a policy in 2007 to offer financial rewards to those having children. But Dmitri Jdanov, head of Max Planck’s data lab, notes that while this produced a slight uptick in births, it mainly encouraged women to have a second child more quickly after the first was born.
Three years later, concerns were growing among Russia’s military leadership that low fertility was becoming a national security issue, with Lieutenant-General Vladimir Shamanov, then commander of airborne forces, proclaiming this a “great danger that we can no longer ignore”.
Shamanov’s fears are borne out in the data: while the number of men aged 18 to 27 is expected to grow sharply from severely depressed levels by 2035, the size of the slightly older cohort aged 30 to 35 will fall by 50 per cent over the same period, according to a study carried out on behalf of Finland’s Defence Research Agency.
Those of prime conscription age, 20 to 24, peaked in 2015 and began declining in 2020, the paper found. The manpower deficit will not be made any easier following the death of at least 15,000 Russian troops since the start of the Ukraine invasion."
www.theguardian.com
