Asked what keeps him up at night, Vladimir Putin identified one problem: Russia’s population decline and the threat it poses to the country’s economy.
Russia’s president, speaking at a press conference last November as he was massing troops along the border with Ukraine, said the country’s birth rate dropped during the second world war and in the early 1990s after the fall of the Soviet Union, which led to shortages in the labour force.
“From a humanitarian point of view and from the perspective of strengthening our statehood, and from the economic point of view, the demographic problem is one of the most important,” he said.
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