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Putin Complained About Shortage Of Women After Russian Birth Rate Collapses To 200-year Low

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Putin Complained About Shortage Of Women After Russian Birth Rate Collapses To 200-year Low
Photo: Getty Images

The dictator of the Russian Federation called irrelevant the words from the song about "10 girls for 9 guys".

Russia is facing a shortage of women, Russian Prime Minister Vladimir Putin said at a meeting with government members on demographic issues on Monday, The Moscow Times reported.

"Colleagues, we discuss demographic issues with you regularly, we remember well, perhaps, the famous song from Soviet times, when girls came to the dance and stood aside because 'there are nine guys for ten girls'. I understand that our statistics have just changed, we now have just not enough women," Putin said.

"Vladimir Vladimirovich, yes, unfortunately, this is a serious problem of ours," Deputy Prime Minister Tatyana Golikova replied to the president. The number of women is decreasing due to two "demographic waves," she explained: the first is from the Great Patriotic War and the second is from the 1990s. These two waves "overlapped and sharply reduced the number of women of reproductive age," Golikova said.

The number of women of reproductive age in Russia has fallen by 13% since 2006, from 39 million to 34 million, and by 2046, according to official forecasts, will fall by another 20%, to 27 million. "That is why we are betting on having many children. Even if there is not a single child in this family, it means plus one, it's still one, two, three," Golikova said.

So far, the propaganda of having many children, traditional values and restrictions on abortion have proved powerless to pull Russia out of the demographic hole. In January-March 2025, the number of births fell by another 4% year-on-year, to 288,800. And this was the minimum for the country since the turn of the XVII-XIX centuries, noted demographer Alexei Raksha.

The authorities responded by classifying detailed demographic statistics (figures by month and by region), and then - and data on the total population of the Russian Federation.

According to available data, last year 1.222 million babies were born in Russia - the minimum since 1999. Compared to 2023, the birth rate decreased by 3.4%, and relative to 2014 - by more than a third. Natural population loss accelerated by 20% at the end of the year and amounted to 596.2 thousand people - that is, on average, almost 50 thousand people a month, or 1.6 thousand a day.

Even in 2018, Putin, within the framework of the national project "Demography", demanded in 6 years to stop the extinction of Russia, which began soon after the annexation of Crimea. The result was the opposite of what was desired: natural decline did not slow down, but accelerated several times, and the accumulated total for 2018-23, mortality exceeded birth rate by 3.4 million people.

Last year, Putin again set the goal of slowing down natural decline to zero - by 2030.

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