Putin demanded that officials at all levels force Russians to have children

All levels of Russian government must be involved in solving the problem of improving the demographic situation in Russia, President Vladimir Putin said on Thursday.

“It is important to educate the younger generation in the spirit of the values ​​of a large, large, friendly family,” Putin said in an address to participants in the Annual All-Russian Demographic Conference.

Having many children, according to the president, should become one of the key conditions for the “confident development of the state and the moral well-being of society.”

“Improving the demographic situation, supporting the birth rate and large families is a priority national task,” Putin emphasized. He added that, in addition to officials, civil society institutions, the media, as well as “projects in a variety of areas” should be involved in this work – from healthcare and education to economics and culture.

Before the start of his fourth presidential term in 2018, Putin demanded to stop the natural decline of Russia’s population within 6 years, which resumed shortly after the annexation of Crimea and by that time amounted to 300 thousand people.

And although 4 trillion rubles were spent from the federal budget on the implementation of this task within the framework of the national project “Demography,” the natural population decline only accelerated: in 2018–23, Russia lost another 3.4 million people as a result of the excess of mortality over the birth rate.

At the end of 2023, according to Rosstat, 1.264 million children were born in Russia, which was the minimum since 1999. Compared to 2014, the birth rate has fallen by more than a third.

If we exclude annexed Crimea and Chechnya from the statistics (data for it were not taken into account in 1993–2003), then the number of children born in the comparable territory – 1.215 million – is an anti-record for the entire modern history of the country, demographer Alexey Raksha previously noted. About the same number were born in the Russian Empire at the turn of the 18th–19th centuries, he pointed out.