We live in a strange time marked by widespread and ongoing depopulation. The entire world is grappling with a crisis of childlessness. By 2015, the global fertility rate had dropped to half of what it was in 1965, and most people now lives in societies with fertility rates below replacement levels. Populations are shrinking across rich and poor nations, secular and religious societies, democracies and autocracies alike.
As the eminent American demographer Nicholas Eberstadt recently observed in Foreign Affairs, “Human beings have no collective memory of depopulation.” The last major episode of large-scale depopulation resulted from the bubonic plague that devastated Eurasia 700 years ago. But what history clearly shows is that depopulation always has political effects. These include a potential increase in warfare—fighting motivated by the desire to compensate, directly or indirectly, for population loss.
Historians have documented the so-called “mourning wars” among Native American tribes during the 17th and 18th centuries. They would raid each other’s communities, kidnapping women and children to compensate for widespread losses of their own people to contagious diseases and warfare. Women and children were absorbed into the raiding tribe, while adult males were usually killed, because they were seen as impossible to integrate. These wars, if they were genocidal, were wars of genocidal inclusion.
Which brings us to Vladimir Putin’s war in Ukraine. How different is it from the mourning wars of the past? In many ways, it resembles an updated version of such a war, a desperate attempt to replenish a dwindling population by forcibly incorporating a neighboring people into Russia’s own.
While the invasion was undoubtedly sparked by imperialist ambitions, anti-Western resentment, and a desire for Great Power recognition, it may also have been conditioned by Russia’s rapidly shrinking, aging, and emigrating population. Russia’s 2100 population is currently projected to shrink to a median of 126 million, an astonishing drop from its current population of roughly 145 million.
Putin’s interpretation of Russia’s dismaying demographic decline through the lens of a cultural war that the West is allegedly waging against Russia, its people, and its civilization, may even have played a decisive role in his decision to launch this cruel and devastating war. And for both sides, the war feels increasingly like a futile struggle to maintain a coherent sense of self in the face of a looming demographic abyss. The brutal nature of the fighting and the unwavering determination of the combatants speak to a profound identity crisis, one that reverberates well beyond the areas of active combat.
A speech Putin delivered to schoolchildren in Vladivostok in 2021, half a year before the invasion, offers a telling glimpse at his obsession with demographics. The Russian president told a story about an imaginary Russia that might have been but sadly never came to be. If not for the massive geopolitical shocks of the 20th century, he explained to the students, the population of Russia would have been around 500 million, three or four times larger than it currently is. Russia’s failure to achieve its demographic promise—not the end of communism—was the greatest tragedy of the 20th century. After reiterating the need to investigate why the country’s natural and predicted population explosion had failed to materialize, he exhorted: “In no case should we allow anything like this in the future.”
Listening to the Russian president talk about the downstream consequences of the 26 to 27 million Soviets who died in World War II, one might have expected him to pray that Russia would manage to avoid future wars. That, however, was the opposite of the lesson he wished to impart. What Russia’s history teaches, Putin explained, is the obligation to do everything possible to reverse the country’s ongoing population decline. Russia’s future depends on its successfully increasing its population; for Putin, population decline reads like a death sentence for Russian civilization.
Traditionally, Russia has defined its security vulnerability in spatial terms. Beginning with the reign of Ivan the Terrible in the 16th century, the Russian Empire managed to expand at an average rate of 50 square miles per day for hundreds of years. During the last years of the Soviet Union, it covered one-sixth of the habitable globe. But Moscow’s obsession with overland expansion and its thinking about security in terms of strategic depth is now a thing of the past.
Today, Russia defines its national security by the size of its population, not the extent of its landmass. Putin understands that, in the world of tomorrow, Russia will be a territorial giant and population dwarf. Russia’s population will not only be much smaller than the populations of India, China, or the United States but also one-half of Ethiopia’s and one-third of Nigeria’s. For Putin, this population decline translates into an irreversible loss of power. As he stated in 2020, “Russia’s destiny and its historic prospects depend on how numerous we will be.”
In a way, Putin’s decision to invade Ukraine was an admission of the failure of his various pro-natalist policies designed to increase the country’s population, particularly the Slavic core of its population. After a series of attempts to increase the country’s fertility rate (including exemption from military service for any man with four children and generous financial incentives for larger families) and to extend the life expectancy of the Russian population, the Russian president seems to have concluded that the only way to achieve a sizable increase in his population is by annexing and subordinating ethnically and culturally related neighbors, by force if necessary. As Eberstadt told the Wall Street Journal: “The most successful population program that the Kremlin has had has been annexing neighboring territories, not increasing the birthrate.” By incorporating Crimea into the Russian Federation in 2014, Putin added around 2.4 million (mostly) ethnic Russians to his country’s population.
Putin’s alleged fear of democracy in neighboring Ukraine may have been a much less decisive motivation for the invasion than his fear of demography—the precipitous decline of the size of Russia’s population and the percentage of ethnic Slavs within it.
Demographic anxiety is not the only cause of Putin’s war. But it is arguably the most consequential and illuminating because it helps us relate the devastating war in Ukraine to simultaneous, parallel outbreaks of violent identity politics in many other countries subject to the same existential trauma of rapid depopulation. The fear of shrinking numbers, a shortage of young people, mass emigration, and growing cultural insecurity are becoming the defining characteristics of the new geopolitical environment.
Plummeting fertility rates and the resulting demographic anxieties are not a uniquely Russian trauma. The trend is observable across the globe. According to a study published in May in The Lancet, by 2021 the fertility rate in more than half of the world’s countries and territories had already fallen below the replacement level of 2.1 children per woman, which is necessary for generational replacement assuming no migration. The study also projected that by 2050, 76 percent of countries and territories will have fertility rates below replacement level, and by 2100, this number will rise to 97 percent. An article published around the same time in Science asserted that the global fertility rate may drop below the replacement level as soon as 2030, indicating a faster decline than previously expected.
The fall in birth rates is a profoundly destabilizing development with complex causes and ramifying consequences. It is almost as if whole societies were deciding to commit collective suicide. Whatever mix of factors explains this extraordinary development, most countries in the world will now have to deal with aging and shrinking populations. They will also have to face popular backlash at the massive migration that has to compensate for the shrinking working-age population and the shocked realization that even the strongest cultural identities are destined to vanish or be transformed beyond recognition within a few generations.
In the 21st century, demographic imagination has supplanted ideological imagination as the driving force shaping humanity’s collective vision of the future. This demographic imagination conjures up a society vastly different culturally from the one we currently inhabit, breeding fear rather than hope. And while demographic projections are often fallible, they nevertheless profoundly shape our expectations and perceptions, putting in question our collective sense of self.
The imperialist wars of the past were often motivated by Malthusian fears of growing populations outstripping the availability of natural resources, and European empires were mesmerized by Ukraine’s fertile “black earth” as the “breadbasket of Europe.” But Putin’s new “imperialistic” war in Ukraine appears to be fueled by a different set of demographic anxieties. He is right that dramatically changing demographics will profoundly affect the foundations of his power. Shrinking populations are rarely a sign of victory and success. The growing need for migrants, with the vast majority coming from Central Asia, is likely to provoke nativist backlash similar to what we witness in Europe.
At the heart of the Kremlin’s calculus seems to be the concern that Russia contains too few people to effectively capitalize on the new opportunities for mineral exploration and extraction in the Arctic region, which are emerging due to the thawing of the permafrost. In this sense, Putin’s territorial ambitions are no longer driven by a desire to secure vital natural resources for a burgeoning population, but rather by a fear that Russia’s shrinking and aging demographic cannot adequately harness the potential of its own vast geographic expanse. In the population wars of the 21st century, the struggle for supremacy is less about controlling territory than about maintaining the demographic strength to exploit it.
But on a more profound level, Russia’s demographic decline goes against the traditionalist turn in Putin’s politics. It breaks the intergenerational contract and challenges the Kremlin’s identity-building project. Understood in this context, Russia’s war in Ukraine is an especially brutal version of what is sometimes called “extinction rebellion.” Like radical environmental activists who glue themselves to the sidewalk, the Russian leader has embraced shockingly disruptive tactics to stave off the ultimate catastrophe, the sweeping away of his people and their culture.
It is emblematic that Russia’s war in Ukraine has involved the large-scale abduction of children, particularly orphans, who have been forcibly transported to Russia and adopted by Russian parents. These newly minted Russians were central to the way Putin defined the objectives of his “special operations.” Ukrainians were to be treated as a reserve army of future Russians destined to increase not simply the Russian Federation’s population but also to reverse the expected decline of the Slavic majority inside Russia, keeping in mind that any future immigration to Russia will mostly come from non-Russian republics of the former Soviet Union and that some minority groups have higher birth rates than Russians.
We should understand Putin’s decision to invade Ukraine not only as a futile effort to reverse Russia’s population decline, but also as his way of combating what he sees as a Western conspiracy to make Russia “childless.” As he made clear in his 2007 Munich Security Conference speech, Putin is convinced that the United States is hell-bent on Russia’s destruction. It is his firm conviction that liberal policies are weapons that the West is deploying to wipe Russia off the map.
Given that fertility rates are dropping across the world, we might have expected Putin to view population decline as a rather neutral process—a natural demographic transition resulting from improved material conditions and increased educational levels, especially among women. However, the Kremlin, in a fashion similar to its right-wing allies around the world, prefers to portray low birth rates as a consequence of Western feminism and LGBTQ-friendly policies that are purportedly designed to reduce the Russian population. It is no accident that the Russian Duma has recently adopted special legislation criminalizing the “propaganda of child-free life,” with the speaker of the house, Vyacheslav Volodin, stating, “It is important to protect people, primarily the younger generation, from having the ideology of childlessness imposed on them on the internet, in the media, in movies, and in advertising.”
In the political imagination of the Kremlin, Western civilization has fallen into irreversible decline, having lost its energy and vitality. Europe, in its view, resembles an “old folks home” managed by migrants. To preserve its power, the West, it believes, is seeking to weaken potentially more energetic civilizations, including Russia’s, by arresting their demographic potential.
In this context, the war in Ukraine is, for Putin, a war to allegedly liberate Ukrainian children from the West’s entrancement by bringing them to Russia. American efforts to promote democracy in Ukraine, seen from Putin’s perspective, amounted to a genocidal campaign against Russia and Russian culture. Brainwashing Ukrainians to hate Russia was allegedly part of a divide-and-conquer strategy to drive a wedge between two sides of a single historical civilization, between two countries “united by a shared history and culture, spiritual values, and millions of familial and human connections,” as Putin put it in a speech in June. By standing its ground against American cultural imperialism, Moscow is not only defending its own identity but also that of all non-Western cultures around the world from “intrusive external interference” by the United States. Russia is even, indirectly, defending Europe, as its current leaders fail to “think in historical categories,” and lose autonomy and cultural specificity under American “military, political, technological, ideological, and informational” domination.
Unlike some of his political allies in the West, Putin has never explicitly quoted the French philosopher René Girard. However, he would likely agree with Girard’s assertion that the world is threatened by apocalyptic “mimetic desire.” In the Kremlin’s view, Russian women are not rejecting motherhood because they distrust the future offered by the Russian state, but rather because they have imitated the decadent choices and behaviors of their Western counterparts. For Putin, it is only by breaking this “mimetic circuit” that Russia can hope to survive and reverse its demographic decline. That explains his battle to reassert Russia’s distinct cultural identity and insulate its citizens from the perceived corrosive effects of Western liberal modernity.
Russia’s demographic decline, viewed from Putin’s perspective, was not some natural process but the result of the West’s war against Russia and the new gender norms advocated by the West and deployed as weapons of cultural extermination. It is telling in this regard that other authoritarian regimes, too, have claimed that decadent western influences are responsible for the decline of the population in their countries. For example, religious authorities in Iran commonly blame “westoxification” for the lifestyle changes that have drastically reduced the country’s birth rate.
Fear of population decline and particularly the diminishing number of young people also resonates with a popular tradition of thinking about societies and civilizations in organic terms and analogizing their development to the life cycle of individuals.
If demographic anxiety was one of the major reasons for Russia to start the war, and if Putin’s decisions are largely shaped by catastrophic demographic imaginings, then Kyiv’s choices are increasingly dictated by the grim realities of Ukraine’s own demographic landscape. For Ukraine, the fear of population decline will likely be among the primary factors pushing its leadership to opt for a swift end to the war, even at the cost of losing a significant chunk of its territory. It is these demographic fears, rather than the unfavorable situation on the frontlines, that may prove to be the most decisive factor in determining when Ukraine chooses to seek a ceasefire.
Ukraine is one of the few countries in the world whose demographic prospects are worse than Russia’s. In 1991, when the country gained independence, its population was around 52 million people. However, a combination of low birth rates, early deaths, and massive out-migration has dramatically reduced this figure. By the time Russia launched its full-scale invasion on February 24, 2022, there were roughly 41 million people living in Ukraine. The years since the beginning of the war have only exacerbated this demographic crisis, turning it into a catastrophe. According to the United Nations, over 6 million Ukrainians have left the country since the start of the war. Additionally, the Wall Street Journal reports that the total population in Ukraine-controlled territory is now as low as 25 million. Alongside military deaths and mass emigration, Ukraine’s birth rate has also collapsed to its lowest recorded levels, with three times as many people dying as being born in the first half of 2024, according to state data.
The painful question now facing President Volodymyr Zelensky is: How many people can Ukraine lose in this war before losing its future? The answer to this question will define Kyiv’s definition of victory and defeat in the conflict. Initially, the Ukrainian leadership was focused on retrieving all of its occupied territories. There has now been a notable shift towards accepting a settlement that would guarantee Ukraine’s integration into NATO and the European Union, at the cost of losing a considerable amount of land—a scenario akin to how West Germany was created after World War II. Kyiv is acutely aware that a prolonged war will devastate Ukraine. A long war means not only more people killed and wounded, but also fewer babies born and fewer Ukrainians returning home from abroad. It was because of these demographic fears that, in the first two years of the war, Kyiv decided not to mobilize young men aged 18-24, dramatically reducing the quality of the Ukrainian armed forces but preserving the country’s demographic potential.
Russia’s war has brought it territories that are now depopulated and devastated, but not the influx of Russians that the Kremlin was hoping for. In the process, the conflict has demonstrated to the world that, contrary to Putin’s claims, Ukrainians are not “bewitched Russians.” The war is also forcing Ukrainian leaders to face the painful need to choose between preserving their people and preserving their territories.
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The Russia-Ukraine war may portend the shape of violent conflicts to come, both domestic and international. That is because the rest of the world, too, is grappling with frightening demographic pressures and anxieties. Everywhere, it seems, the survival of collective identities hangs in the balance. The population loss experienced by historically dominant groups seems to be preparing the way for an upheaval of end-times aggression, enflamed by a primal fear of national extinction.
The war between Russia and Ukraine is sometimes described as a war of the past, a typical war of attrition. But it is much more radical and terrifying than that. It is the first modern “mourning war.” It is unlikely to be the last.
The post The Battle for Ukraine Is a War of Demography appeared first on Foreign Policy.
