What The Hell America!

Russia was in demographic decline long before the war in Ukraine. Now it’s in free fall.

Since 2022, hundreds of thousands of Russians have died or suffered critical injuries in Ukraine. The result: According to one demographer, Russians may have had fewer children from January to March 2025 than in any three-month period over the past 200 years. As of 2023, the country’s fertility rate—1.4 births per woman—lies well below replacement level and amounts to a roughly 20 percent drop compared with 2015. In some regions, births fell that much in just 12 months. Last year, deaths outpaced births by more than half a million.

This crisis has led to one of the world’s most extreme natalism campaigns—and one of the weirdest. President Vladimir Putin has commanded his government to “stimulate” Russian women to have at least three children, and to make sure they get pregnant when they’re young. To that end, the Ministry of Education has been discussing ways to create “conditions for romantic relations” in schools. Last month, Moscow’s Department of Health displayed giant pink banners around the city asking women, How’s it going? Still haven’t given birth?

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If this is supposed to make them want to procreate, it doesn’t seem to be working—at least not for Larisa, a 21-year-old university student who was incredulous when she saw the sign on her way to campus. Even though her parents cover the cost of her car and apartment, she told me, “I have enough money to pay just for my food. Forget three babies.” Indeed, the Kremlin’s own polling has shown that almost 40 percent of Russian women of childbearing age say they won’t have kids in the next five years because of financial concerns.

Most of Larisa’s friends are like her: women in their early 20s who came to Moscow to study and start their career. That’s precisely the path that Russian leaders are trying to discourage. Irina Filatova, a member of Parliament, recently warned that young women’s ideas about “self-development” are a threat to Russia’s “traditional family values.” But if they insist on going to college, then at least they should find a husband there, so they “can give birth at age 18 or 19,” another female legislator suggested last year.

To assuage concerns about the cost of having kids, authorities in the Oryol region recently began offering pregnant students $1,200. Daria Yakovleva, a women’s-rights activist, told me that such programs may lead girls to think of childbearing as a ticket to economic security, even though having children in Russia often entrenches poverty. Svetlana Gannushkina witnesses these financial burdens firsthand. A human-rights advocate who served on Russia’s Presidential Council for Civil Society and Human Rights, Gannushkina helps low-income families that are unable to provide for their children. She doesn’t see government handouts as a solution. “Paying girls money for pregnancies is a strange approach,” Gannushkina told me. “Authorities should be forcing men to feel responsible, first of all, but so far, all we hear is demands for women—what women should not do or should do.”

One of Gannushkina’s clients, Takhmina, is pregnant with her eighth child, and her husband makes less than $800 a month. Gannushkina told me that the state was supposed to send them financial aid but has withheld it since a right-wing mob attacked Takhmina’s family online because they’re ethnically Tajik. Evidently, Gannushkina said, “she is not the kind of pregnant woman they want.”

The Russian government is trying not only to encourage pregnancies but also to make terminating them as hard as possible. Politicians have restricted access to abortion, and regulators are clamping down on the distribution of abortion pills such as mifepristone.

None of these interventions addresses an underlying reason Russian women say they don’t want children—the country’s “negative political situation,” a pollster’s euphemism for authoritarianism and war.

Russia’s leaders rarely acknowledge the toll this “situation” takes on citizens. Many women are depressed, lonely, and afraid. Every day, the war makes more of them widows. For others, the source of fear is the country’s pervasive problem with domestic violence, which the government partially decriminalized in 2017. Earlier this month, one particularly shocking case garnered national attention. A Russian mother named Ksenia Dushanova alleged that her boyfriend attacked her while she was asleep, gouging out one of her eyes with a car key, breaking her arm, and slashing her face. She posted images of her injuries on Instagram and wrote that her assailant had apparently been released from custody when he’d agreed to fight in the war.

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The Russian activist Alena Popova leads a group that documents domestic violence across the country, with a focus on abuses committed by service members coming back from the front. Last year, she told me, more than 2,500 Russians contacted her team asking for help. The group also tracks the violence and mistreatment that many pregnant women experience in hospitals. One patient who received an abortion in the city of Surgut told local media that her doctors provided no pain relief and told her, when she cried out, to “shut up and not perform as in a circus.”

As part of its campaign to deter abortions, the state enlists doctors to create “positive attitudes toward having children” during pre-abortion consultations. Local governments report how many minds they change; last week, the region containing Surgut said that last year its doctors had persuaded 1,249 women who’d considered terminating their pregnancy to give birth. In a concerning sign for the government, the tally was lower than last year’s.

Putin’s biggest problem, though, won’t be solved by convincing women to carry their pregnancy to term. He’s created a society that Russians no longer want to bring children into. Getting them to reconsider will take more than government checks and pink banners.