A short update on Russian demography
It is now possible to see what the Ukraine War has done to the Russian birth rate. So far, not much.
Life is not easy in Russia these days. Even if you do not have to fight on the Ukrainian front, which the vast majority of Russians do not have to do, prospects in Russia are bleak. Sanctions make everyday life a tad more difficult and even the most patriotic have begun to feel that the war is not going entirely to plan, meaning significant changes might be heading their way. Circumstances like these are generally not good for fertility rates.
Despite its current challenges, Russia is still a developed nation with a surprisingly effective statistics agency. Rumor has it that many statistics have been censored due to the war (I have not verified this myself) but demographic statistics are still presented as usual.
In Russia's case this means monthly updates on things like births and deaths. The numbers for December 2022 were published a couple of weeks ago and during the weekend the statistics for January 2023 were presented. Both months are more than 9 months after Russia's invasion of Ukraine, which started 24 February 2022, meaning it should be possible to see what effect, if any, the war has had on Russian childbearing.
What the numbers say
In December 2022 there were 108,325 births in Russia and 164,540 deaths (source) compared to 117,946 births and 215,529 deaths in December 2021 (source).
In January 2023 there were 104,199 births and 168,418 deaths (source) compared to 103,782 births and 192,952 deaths in January 2022 (source).
Clearly, there is no collapse in Russian child making. The January birth numbers are even increasing slightly compared to before the war. Deaths are also decreasing sharply. This should mostly be due to decreased mortality in Covid, which hit Russia hard last winter. A few thousand combat deaths per month are not enough to changee anything here.
These children born in December and January should have been conceived in March and April last year. In March it was probably not apparent to the Russian public that the war was not going Russia's way, but in April it should have been hard to miss. This makes it even more confusing that the January numbers are better than the December numbers.
Maybe Russian women started having more children out of a feeling of patriotic duty. More probably the small changes we are seeing in the numbers are natural variations not directly related to the war. After all, most people do not make decisions on procreation based on day-to-day news reports. We will most likely have to wait several more months before any clear trend shows itself.
A thirty year old ghost
The fact that Russian births are only decreasing slightly in December and actually increasing in January should be seen as a great success for Russia. The reason for this is to be found 30-35 years ago.
In 1991 the Soviet Union collapsed. Another thing that also collapsed was Russian birth rates. In 1987 there were 2.50 million births in Russia. In 1993 there were only 1.38 million (source). This is astonishing but the number of births almost halved in just six years. The consequences of this are still felt.
Russia has quite young mothers for a developed nation. The average age of childbirth has been increasing but is still only 28.7 years (source). The girls born in 1987 are now 35 years old and are beginning to disappear from the maternity wards. Instead they are replaced with women from the 1990s. After 1993 the Russian birth rate plateaued, reached an all-time low in 1999 and then started to slowly increase again. For every year that passes right now, Russia's stock of women of childbearing age is decreasing rapidly.
To actually increase births in such adverse conditions is something of a feat. The large cohorts from the early and mid 1980s were of prime childbearing age in the early 2010s. 2014 was also the year of the most births in Russia, 1.94 million, since the 1980s. Since then, every year has seen fewer births than the year before, including in 2022 when there were only 1.31 million births, only slightly above the nadir in 1999.
Running just to stay still
The Russian leadership is very well aware of its demographic problem. They are also doing what they can to alleviate it. Including with customary Russian methods. When Russia annexed Crimea in 2014 its population of 2.2 million was immediately incorporated into the Russian statistics, adding some extra births every year since then. The recently annexed Ukrainian regions have not yet entered the Russian statistics, but presumably they will, adding a few million more inhabitants to the Russian republic.
Capturing the people of other countries to increase one’s own population has a whiff of the Medieval over it. Even more, it will not solve Russia's problem. If only because Ukraine's fertility rate is even lower than Russia's. The January statistics might have been a pleasant surprise but it is unlikely to last. The demographic headwinds are simply too strong.
A good time to look again might be in six months time. The statistics then will show babies conceived in September and October of last year. By that time disillusion with the Russian military project had definitely set in and people should have understood that the war might be long. Even more, by that time hundreds of thousands of young men had been drafted into the army and hundreds of thousands of others had fled abroad, setting up significant practical hurdles to child making. If Russian birth numbers are still holding up then we can start talking about a real demographic miracle.
Your forgot to mention 1 important aspect. Birth rates in Russia are very different in different regions.
Birth rates in Chechnya, Dagestan (and North Caucusus in general) are very high. Birth rates in ethnically-russian regions are below the floor. You are only analyzing the average.
Your work is well edited, but I did find "changee" about halfway through. Also the Apple Pie boys are yelling "graphs!" at you. I'd have been happy with simple tables, but graphs go a long way.
Last of all, I agree that six months is a better time to look at their fertility rates. Most people don't make childbearing decisions for rational reasons, and many don't make decisions at all: children simply happen. Give Russia a while to start to *feel* the effects of the war, as patriotism drops, cynicism rises, the economic situation worsens, and relationships begin to fray under the strain.