Children are disappearing, while the number of pensioners is growing: Russia’s demographic crisis is worsening

Russia is facing a deep demographic crisis that began as early as the beginning of the 1990s. Over the past decades, the number of young children in the country has more than halved, while the number of people over the age of 65 has increased significantly. This is reported by the Foreign Intelligence Service of Ukraine, as reported by UNN.

Details

While the global community is only now beginning to record the global aging of the population, Russia plunged into a deep demographic crisis as early as the beginning of the 1990s. The number of elderly people in the Russian Federation has long exceeded the number of young children, and the gap between generations is deepening every year, leaving the country without a demographic future. The catastrophic trends are evidenced by the inverted age structure of the population. If, at the end of the 1980s, the number of children under the age of five and people over 65 was approximately the same—about 14.5 million people—then over the past decades the situation has become critical

According to the agency, the number of infants has more than halved—to 6.5 million, while the number of pensioners has risen to 23.7 million.

The intelligence service  cites chronically low birth rates, which remain below the level necessary even for simple population replacement, as one of the main causes of the demographic changes.

Despite regular statements by pro-government experts about the country's "relative youth" compared with Japan or the EU, the real figures point to a severe reduction in the working-age population and an unbearable burden on the social system. Russians are not merely aging; they are also being left without prospects for replenishing the human resources

In addition, according to available data, the continued decline in the proportion of children means that within one or two decades the country will face an acute shortage of young specialists, and there will simply be no one to give birth to a new generation.

Russia has effectively led the negative global trend, overtaking the global demographic turning point by almost 30 years. Against the backdrop of economic and social problems, the country is confidently moving along the path of depopulation, transforming into a state with fading demographic potential

Let us recall

In 26 regions of Russia, 165 abandoned settlements were eliminated in less than eight months of 2026. According to Ukrainian intelligence, the leaders in the rate of depopulation and legal liquidation of villages were Novgorod region (according to various data, from 21 to 35 villages erased from the map) and Kostroma region (from 21 to 23 settlements).