Image Credentials: Image Title: Russia’s Birth Rate Falls to Lowest Level in Two Centuries, Deepening Demographic Crisis Source: AI-Generated Image (Aiease.ai) Date: April 2025 Attribution: Created by AI-generated imagery (Aiease.ai), and it does not depict a real-world scene.
By Staff Writer with Agencies 📢📰
MOSCOW — Russia’s demographic challenges have reached a historic low, with birth rates falling to levels unseen since the early 19th century, according to new figures released this week by the Russian Federal State Statistics Service (Rosstat).
Between January and February 2025, only 195,400 births were registered nationwide—a 3 percent decline compared to the same period last year. February alone saw a sharp 7.6 percent drop, with just 90,500 babies born, the lowest monthly figure recorded in modern Russian history, according to demographer Alexei Raksha.
Preliminary estimates for March suggest between 95,000 and 96,000 births, putting the total for the first quarter of 2025 at around 293,000 to 294,000. Rosstat has yet to confirm the final March data.
Meanwhile, the death rate, though slightly lower than last year, continues to outpace births by a significant margin. In the first two months of 2025, 331,100 deaths were recorded—a 5.2 percent decrease from 2024—resulting in a natural population decline of nearly 119,000 people.
A Sharp and Uneven Decline
The current birth rate crisis follows a troubling trend that has been accelerating over the past decade. In 2024, Russia recorded just 1.222 million births, the lowest figure since 1999, and a one-third drop compared to 2014.
Some regions have been hit especially hard. Births in Smolensk fell by 26.6 percent, Kostroma by 21.6 percent, Karelia by 19.4 percent, Arkhangelsk by 18.7 percent, and Oryol by 18.6 percent. In regions like Kaluga and Ivanovo, deaths now outnumber births by a ratio of two to one, while in Vladimir and Belgorod, three times as many people are dying as being born.
Government Measures Falling Short
Despite numerous government initiatives—including restrictions on abortion, financial incentives for larger families, and the promotion of “traditional values”—the downward trend has proven difficult to reverse.
Rosstat projections based on the 2020 census paint a grim picture: by 2027, annual births could fall to 1.14 million. Even with a slight recovery expected in the late 2020s, the number of births by 2045 is forecast to remain 25 percent lower than before 2014.
Even if death rates stabilize around 1.8 million annually, the Russian population is expected to shrink by about half a million people each year.
By 2046, Rosstat’s baseline scenario predicts Russia’s population will fall to 138.8 million. A more pessimistic forecast suggests a drop to 130 million, levels last seen in 1897 during the Russian Empire.
An Aging Nation
Demographic projections also show a dramatic aging of Russia’s population. By the early 2040s, the number of children and teenagers is expected to decline by 26 percent to 20 million, shrinking their share of the population from 18.5 percent to 14.2 percent. At the same time, the proportion of elderly citizens will rise from 24.5 percent to nearly 27 percent by 2046.
Russia’s population peaked at 149 million in 1993. The current trajectory suggests a long-term reversal of that milestone, raising concerns about future economic growth, military capacity, and social stability.
As the demographic crisis deepens, policymakers face mounting pressure to craft more effective solutions to halt or at least slow the country’s shrinking population.