• A speech Putin delivered to schoolchildren in Vladivostok in 2021, half a year before the invasion, offers a telling glimpse at his obsession with demographics. The Russian president told a story about an imaginary Russia that might have been but sadly never came to be. If not for the massive geopolitical shocks of the 20th century, he explained to the students, the population of Russia would have been around 500 million, three or four times larger than it currently is. Russia’s failure to achieve its demographic promise—not the end of communism—was the greatest tragedy of the 20th century. After reiterating the need to investigate why the country’s natural and predicted population explosion had failed to materialize, he exhorted: “In no case should we allow anything like this in the future.”
• Traditionally, Russia has defined its security vulnerability in spatial terms. Beginning with the reign of Ivan the Terrible in the 16th century, the Russian Empire managed to expand at an average rate of 50 square miles per day for hundreds of years. During the last years of the Soviet Union, it covered one-sixth of the habitable globe. But Moscow’s obsession with overland expansion and its thinking about security in terms of strategic depth is now a thing of the past.
• Today, Russia defines its national security by the size of its population, not the extent of its landmass. Putin understands that, in the world of tomorrow, Russia will be a territorial giant and population dwarf. Russia’s population will not only be much smaller than the populations of India, China, or the United States but also one-half of Ethiopia’s and one-third of Nigeria’s. For Putin, this population decline translates into an irreversible loss of power. As he stated in 2020, “Russia’s destiny and its historic prospects depend on how numerous we will be.”
• In a way, Putin’s decision to invade Ukraine was an admission of the failure of his various pro-natalist policies designed to increase the country’s population, particularly the Slavic core of its population. After a series of attempts to increase the country’s fertility rate (including exemption from military service for any man with four children and generous financial incentives for larger families) and to extend the life expectancy of the Russian population, the Russian president seems to have concluded that the only way to achieve a sizable increase in his population is by annexing and subordinating ethnically and culturally related neighbors, by force if necessary. As Eberstadt told the Wall Street Journal: “The most successful population program that the Kremlin has had has been annexing neighboring territories, not increasing the birthrate.” By incorporating Crimea into the Russian Federation in 2014, Putin added around 2.4 million (mostly) ethnic Russians to his country’s population.
• Putin’s alleged fear of democracy in neighboring Ukraine may have been a much less decisive motivation for the invasion than his fear of demography—the precipitous decline of the size of Russia’s population and the percentage of ethnic Slavs within it.
• Demographic anxiety is not the only cause of Putin’s war. But it is arguably the most consequential and illuminating because it helps us relate the devastating war in Ukraine to simultaneous, parallel outbreaks of violent identity politics in many other countries subject to the same existential trauma of rapid depopulation. The fear of shrinking numbers, a shortage of young people, mass emigration, and growing cultural insecurity are becoming the defining characteristics of the new geopolitical environment.
• At the heart of the Kremlin’s calculus seems to be the concern that Russia contains too few people to effectively capitalize on the new opportunities for mineral exploration and extraction in the Arctic region, which are emerging due to the thawing of the permafrost. In this sense, Putin’s territorial ambitions are no longer driven by a desire to secure vital natural resources for a burgeoning population, but rather by a fear that Russia’s shrinking and aging demographic cannot adequately harness the potential of its own vast geographic expanse. In the population wars of the 21st century, the struggle for supremacy is less about controlling territory than about maintaining the demographic strength to exploit it.
• We should understand Putin’s decision to invade Ukraine not only as a futile effort to reverse Russia’s population decline, but also as his way of combating what he sees as a Western conspiracy to make Russia “childless.” As he made clear in his 2007 Munich Security Conference speech, Putin is convinced that the United States is hell-bent on Russia’s destruction. It is his firm conviction that liberal policies are weapons that the West is deploying to wipe Russia off the map.
• Unlike some of his political allies in the West, Putin has never explicitly quoted the French philosopher René Girard. However, he would likely agree with Girard’s assertion that the world is threatened by apocalyptic “mimetic desire.” In the Kremlin’s view, Russian women are not rejecting motherhood because they distrust the future offered by the Russian state, but rather because they have imitated the decadent choices and behaviors of their Western counterparts. For Putin, it is only by breaking this “mimetic circuit” that Russia can hope to survive and reverse its demographic decline. That explains his battle to reassert Russia’s distinct cultural identity and insulate its citizens from the perceived corrosive effects of Western liberal modernity.
• Ukraine is one of the few countries in the world whose demographic prospects are worse than Russia’s. In 1991, when the country gained independence, its population was around 52 million people. However, a combination of low birth rates, early deaths, and massive out-migration has dramatically reduced this figure. By the time Russia launched its full-scale invasion on February 24, 2022, there were roughly 41 million people living in Ukraine. The years since the beginning of the war have only exacerbated this demographic crisis, turning it into a catastrophe.  According to the United Nations, over 6 million Ukrainians have left the country since the start of the war. Additionally, the Wall Street Journal reports that the total population in Ukraine-controlled territory is now as low as 25 million. Alongside military deaths and mass emigration, Ukraine’s birth rate has also collapsed to its lowest recorded levels, with three times as many people dying as being born in the first half of 2024, according to state data.
• The painful question now facing President Volodymyr Zelensky is: How many people can Ukraine lose in this war before losing its future? The answer to this question will define Kyiv’s definition of victory and defeat in the conflict. Initially, the Ukrainian leadership was focused on retrieving all of its occupied territories. There has now been a notable shift towards accepting a settlement that would guarantee Ukraine’s integration into NATO and the European Union, at the cost of losing a considerable amount of land—a scenario akin to how West Germany was created after World War II. Kyiv is acutely aware that a prolonged war will devastate Ukraine. A long war means not only more people killed and wounded, but also fewer babies born and fewer Ukrainians returning home from abroad. It was because of these demographic fears that, in the first two years of the war, Kyiv decided not to mobilize young men aged 18-24, dramatically reducing the quality of the Ukrainian armed forces but preserving the country’s demographic potential.
• The Russia-Ukraine war may portend the shape of violent conflicts to come, both domestic and international. That is because the rest of the world, too, is grappling with frightening demographic pressures and anxieties. Everywhere, it seems, the survival of collective identities hangs in the balance. The population loss experienced by historically dominant groups seems to be preparing the way for an upheaval of end-times aggression, enflamed by a primal fear of national extinction.
• The war between Russia and Ukraine is sometimes described as a war of the past, a typical war of attrition. But it is much more radical and terrifying than that. It is the first modern “mourning war.” It is unlikely to be the last.

Read the full article at the Foreign Policy website.

Opinions expressed herein are solely those of the author. AP Photo/Efrem Lukatsky.