MOSCOW: The Kremlin said on Friday that it was “working hard” to reverse declining birth rates in Russia, warning that “disastrous” demographic trends were putting the country’s future at risk.

Russia has faced a myriad of demographic challenges since the collapse of the USSR, including an aging population, an outflow of men due to the conflict in Ukraine and the lowest fertility rate in 17 years.

“It is now at a terribly low level — 1.4 (births per woman). This is comparable to European countries, Japan and so on. But this is disastrous for the future of the nation,” Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov told a media festival.

“Anyone with many children is a hero. We live in the largest country in the world. And there are fewer of us every year. And the only way to cope with this is to increase the average birth rate,” Peskov said.

Russia had a population of 148 million people at the breakup of the Soviet Union in 1991, a figure that now stands at around 144m after a protracted period of high deaths and low births in the 1990s.

The country’s birth rate has not recovered since Soviet times despite President Vladimir Putin’s government offering generous payouts and mortgage subsidies to large families.

Published in Dawn, July 27th, 2024