Russia's Tide Of Death

So far in the war in the Ukraine, the BBC have identified the names of 106,745 Russian soldiers killed during the full-scale invasion of Ukraine ..... 

Russian War Dead Fly Flags

..... but this is only those deaths that have been traceable via the web.

So the true number killed in the fighting in the Ukraine is clearly much, much, higher. In fact according to their study, military experts have estimates that their number may only be between 45% and 65% of the total deaths, which could mean that the figure is somewhere between 164,223and 237,211 people.

However one thing is true, and that is these dead men are likely to all be in the ages range 18 to 35 .... older men are unlikely to be fighters on the front-line. War is always a young man's game. So if we say around 200,000 Russian men in that age range have died, what is that as a proportion of the demographics for that range?

Well with a birth rate of just 1.41, Russia already had an ageing crisis. and has one of the oldest populations in the world, with a median age of 41.9 years. So these deaths are coming out of a group who it could ill afford to lose in the first place .....

There are around 17 million Russian males in that age group, so losing 200,000 of them is a noticeable loss .... 200,000 is approximately 1.176% of 17,000,000 which doesn't sound much, but if those 200,000 had lived, and half had produced the 1.41 child births (assuming the older half had already done so), then that equates to 141,000 lost child births, which given that those children will never grow and have kids themselves could be the equivalent of a further loss of perhaps as many as another 198,000 lives in 20 - 30 years time.

Sadly, the Ukraine is also likely to have suffered at least 100,000 deaths in the war, and maybe more. It also has ageing and demographic issues, so a lot of this post could well apply to them as well. These losses will continue to ripple through the demographics for decades, much like the losses on the Western front in WWI affected the demographics of France, Britain and Germany right up to WWII.

Russia is aware of the demographic crisis that its in right now, and also of the impact of the losses in the Ukraine, and has tried a number of ruses to try and get Russian women to have more children, but the only way you can force educated women to have lots of children, is to pay them to have kids, or deny them birth control, and or, ban them from both education and birth control e.g. Afghanistan.

Russia has tried in the past to tax couples with not enough children, but it didn't stop the general decline ... the issue is one that all the western countries are also facing, but for Russia, with its south western neighbours all being Muslim republics that don't have the same birth rate issues, it could become existential.