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DOMINIC LAWSON

Putin is haunted by the loss of ‘real’ Russians

Population decline is the driver of the war — and may decide its outcome

The Sunday Times

Russia’s airstrike on a hospital maternity unit in Mariupol has captured, for many, the monstrous cruelty of Vladimir Putin’s war on Ukraine. But it was also a grotesque metaphor for the fear underlying Putin’s attempt to reincorporate Ukraine within what he calls the Russian “family”.

Put simply, Russian deaths exceed births, to an extent that — to use his spokesman’s word — “haunts” the man in the Kremlin. Last year, not least because of the coronavirus, the Russian population experienced a natural decline (the effects of immigration excluded) of over a million. But even before the pandemic Russia’s official statistical body, Rosstat, pointed out that the country had suffered a “net loss” of one person every thirty seconds in 2018.

In recent years the rate