The writer is the FT’s former demography correspondent
Despite the vast combat operation currently under way in Ukraine, the Kremlin has refrained from a full military mobilisation and refused to admit that it is at war. There are plenty of strategic reasons for this decision, but an underlying demographic weakness may also be partly to blame: Russia has been producing too few babies since the 1991 collapse of the Soviet Union to even keep its population stable, let alone build up an army.
This trend is not specific to Russia — falling fertility rates have been a characteristic of almost all developed economies for several decades. While the world is at peace, the necessary adjustments to rising longevity and falling fertility tend to focus on economic and social policies. As we have seen across Europe and the US, governments are raising state pension ages and looking at support for working mothers. War, however, casts falling fertility in a different light.