Russian President Vladimir Putin has recommended that women have eight or more children in an effort to offset the looming population crisis the country faces, caused by casualties suffered in the Ukrainian war as well as abortion.
Putin, who has two daughters, made the announcement at the World Russian People’s Council in Moscow on Tuesday, in which he explained the Russian people has [sic] to return to a time when larger families were the societal norm.
“Many of our grandmothers and great-grandmothers, had seven, eight, or even more children,” he stated. “Let us preserve and revive these excellent traditions. Large families must become the norm, a way of life for all of Russia’s people. The family is not just the foundation of the state and society, it is a spiritual phenomenon, a source of morality.”
“Preserving and increasing the population of Russia is our goal for the coming decades and even generations ahead. This is the future of the Russian world, the millennium-old, eternal Russia,” Putin continued.
Russia, like many other Western countries, is suffering from low birth rates, at around 1.5 per woman – far below the required 2.1 to maintain its current population. It also has extremely high rates of abortion, regularly above half a million per year. Yet, those figures represent an improvement compared to the beginning of the century in which there were an estimated 2.1 million abortions per year.
Worse still, Western estimates place the number of casualties caused by the War in Ukraine at around 325,000 as of late November.
