Russian President Vladimir Putin is urging Russians to have more children.
"Large families must become the norm," Putin said in a speech Tuesday.
Russian birth rates are falling amid war in Ukraine and a deepening economic crisis.
Russian President Vladimir Putin is urging women to have as many as eight children as the number of dead Russian soldiers continues to rise in his war with Ukraine, worsening the country’s population crisis.
Addressing the World Russian People’s Council in Moscow on Tuesday, Putin said the country must return to a time when large families were the norm.
“Many of our grandmothers and great-grandmothers, had seven, eight, or even more children,” Putin said.
This is the best summary I could come up with:
Addressing the World Russian People’s Council in Moscow on Tuesday, Putin said the country must return to a time when large families were the norm.
Putin’s remarks come amid decades of falling birth rates in Russia that its invasion of Ukraine and the subsequent economic fallout have only made worse.
In October, the UK’s Ministry of Defence reported that Russia has likely amassed up to 290,000 killed or wounded soldiers in the war against Ukraine.
Since coming into power 24 years ago, Putin has tried to boost Russia’s birthrate by introducing a range of government incentives for those who have children, including payouts for families who have more than one child.
But the measures have had little to no impact, with figures from Rosstat, Russia’s federal-statistics service, putting the Russian population at 146,447,424 as of January 1, lower than it was in 1999 when Putin first became president, Le Monde reported.
“Russia lacks workers,” Alexei Raksha, a demographer who previously worked at Rosstat, told AFP in February.
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