Russian President Vladimir Putin is urging Russians to have more children.
"Large families must become the norm," Putin said in a speech Tuesday.
Russian birth rates are falling amid war in Ukraine and a deepening economic crisis.
Russian President Vladimir Putin is urging women to have as many as eight children as the number of dead Russian soldiers continues to rise in his war with Ukraine, worsening the country’s population crisis.
Addressing the World Russian People’s Council in Moscow on Tuesday, Putin said the country must return to a time when large families were the norm.
“Many of our grandmothers and great-grandmothers, had seven, eight, or even more children,” Putin said.
Kids are cheap. All you really need is food and people.
Schools and car seats and houses are expensive, but if a generation has tons of kids, you’ll have the manpower to make those things in 15 years.
Russia is kind of fucked right now and not only in demographic decline, but making it worse by killing half their young people. Will they pull out of it? Probably not.
But can they afford it? They absolutely can. And it’s bad news for the rest of the world if they do. Don’t underestimate this move. Especially because China is doing the same.
China is doing that by lifting restrictions it previously had on the number of kids per family.
In Russia there never was a limit, and a driver for change should be different. Putin asking Russians to make more kids won’t magically improve demographics. Russia is fighting battle for demographics for about 15 years now, and it yielded very little result.
Right now people in the country are strongly uncertain about their future, economic changes leave more and more young people out of money to just live, let alone raise kids (and no, not many here will agree to have children regardless of any obstacles), and young males are actively dying on the war.
Unless a radical change is made to the economy, to all those things listed above, Russia will not succeed in drastically improving reproduction rates.
Source: I’m Russian.
No. They are trying to culturally push people to have kids now. Dropping one child not only didn’t work, their birth rates went down since then.
No, but Putin can do more than ask. So can China.
Russia already has
-Childbirth propaganda everywhere
-Payments to mothers giving birth (“mother’s capital”)
-Strong benefits for people with kids when buying housing
-Generous maternity leave
-Strong infrastructure of kindergardens
-Fairly strict anti-abortion laws
And a lot more. It kinda already does its best.