The song "Where have all the flowers gone?" was written in the 1960's. The New York Times reports on the question of where all the men are.
The answer to both questions is the same. A lot of the missing men of Moscow have fled to other countries.
"Putin spent years racing against Russia's demographic clock, only to order an invasion of Ukraine that's consigning his country's population to a historic decline," the news service reported. Russia's "perfect storm" of demographic decline has been described by a demographer.
80,000 of the 300,000 men drafted by Putin are already in Ukraine. 300,000 Russians fled to other countries to avoid the draft, according to reports. In August, the Pentagon estimated that Russia had killed about 80,000 people in Ukraine. Moscow resident Stanislava told the Times that she felt like a country of women. I was looking for male friends to help me move furniture, and I realized that most of them had left.
The founder of Russia's Chop-Chop barber shop empire says you can see the massive relocation wave more in Moscow and St.
When the Kremlin pressed the urban professionals into military service, they got a rude shock. The Times reported that the ranks of Moscow's intelligentsia, who often have disposable income and passports for foreign travel, have thinned noticeably. Some regions have it worse than others.
According to Yekaterina Morland of the Asians of Russia Foundation, mobilization rates in the far north of Russia are six times higher than in Europe. In those regions, enlistment officers scoured the tundra and handed out summonses to anyone they met.
Paul Goble writes at the Eurasia Daily Monitor that Russia had a huge gender discrepancy before the Ukraine invasion. Russian men at "prime child-bearing age" are dying in Ukraine or fleeing Putin's draft, which will further depress the population, according to the results of the 2020 census.
The number of women of reproductive age in Russia has fallen by about a third in the past decade as the country's population decline has increased. The aftermath of the invasion is making the worst scenarios more likely.
According to a demographer in Moscow, if the war continues until the end of next spring, it would becatastrophic for Russia. Russia's fertility rate dropped to 1.2 children per woman in the 1999-2000 period, the lowest mark in a decade. Russia is facing serious questions about its ability to attract workers from abroad due to its low fertility rate.
According to a research fellow at the conservative Institute for Family Studies, Ukraine was already hurting demographically before the invasion. Russia and Ukraine have low fertility rates, but Russia has implemented pro-natal policies that have helped the country avoid extreme fertility declines.
Stone predicts that "Ukraine's position compared to Russia's will continue to erode as the gaps in fertility rates between the two countries grow wider." Core demographic factors like birth rates and migration rates are important, but they are not destiny and Ukraine has turned demographic decline into military rejuvenation through alliance-building and the willingness of Ukrainians to fight.
Putin will be addingUkraine's unfavorable demographic to his own problems if Russia succeeds in annexing significant parts of the country.
It's doable. Sometimes wars lead to higher fertility, as when sudden bursts of conception occur as men deploy for battle. Monthly birth data from the 1940s shows that the U.S. baby boom began as G.I.'s left for war. "After the fighting ends, nationalist ideas may make people susceptible to pro-natal ideas and policies, even as so-called'replacement fertility' often leads families to respond to high-casualty events by having'replacement' children," he says.
According to Elena Churilova, a research fellow in the Higher School Economics's International Laboratory for Population and Health, many couples will delay having children until the situation improves. The birth rate is likely to decline in the years to come.
Downloads of dating apps have increased in countries where Russian men fled. "All of the most reasonable guys are no longer with us," said a 36-year-old woman. The dating pool has shrunken.
"Putin's war will cast a shadow on Russia for a long time to come, one growing ever darker the longer the war continues," Goble wrote. The loss of Russian men to emigration and battlefield death will leave a huge hole in Russian society, and those who do manage to return will experience enormous problems.
The birthrate is almost destined to decline because of the shape of the population pyramid. Russia's need for more people is a motivating consideration for its current aggressive posture toward Ukraine, even as the idea that Ukrainians would sign up to be good Russians is largely delusional.
Thousands of Ukrainian children have been spirited off to Russia to be placed in Russian "foster families" because they don't want to be good Russians.
Maria Lvova-Belova, Russia's children's rights commissioner, said in October that she had adopted a boy from Mariupol, which was bombed by the Russians. In September, the U.S., British, and other Western nations imposed sanctions on Lvova-Belova, accusing her of masterminding the removal of more than 2,000 vulnerable children from Ukraine.
Demography and assumptions about how nations will react to demographic changes are not perfect. For a long time, one common argument in the U.S. policy community was that Russia's demographic troubles would affect its ability to project power outside its borders.
The geriatric peace theory wasn't a good fit for Russia. Population aging and contraction are new trends that we don't know much about, and we shouldn't expect aging states to act like aging individuals.
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