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For a quarter century, President Vladimir Putin has faced the specter of Russia’s shrinking and aging population.
In 1999, a year before he came to power, the number of babies born in Russia plunged to its lowest recorded level. In 2005, Putin said the demographic woes needed to be resolved by maintaining “social and economic stability.”
In 2019, he said the problem still “haunted” the country.
As recently as Thursday, he told a Kremlin demographic conference that increasing births was “crucial” for Russia.
Putin has launched initiatives to encourage people to have more children — from free school meals for large families to awarding Soviet-style “hero-mother” medals to women with 10 or more children.
“Many of our grandmothers and great-grandmothers had seven, eight, and even more children,” Putin said in 2023. “Let’s preserve and revive these wonderful traditions. Having many children and a large family must become the norm.”

At first, births in Russia grew with its economic prosperity, from 1.21 million babies born in 1999 to 1.94 million in 2015.
But those hard-won gains are crumbling against a backdrop of financial uncertainty, the war in Ukraine, an exodus of young men and opposition to immigration.
Russia’s population has fallen from 147.6 million in 1990 — the year before the USSR collapsed — to 146.1 million this year, according to Russia’s Federal Statistics Service. Since the 2014 illegal annexation of Crimea, it has included the peninsula’s population of about 2 million, as well as births and deaths there, in its data.
The population also is significantly older. In 1990, 21.1 percent was 55 or older, government data said. In 2024, that figure was 30 percent.
Since the 2015 peak, the number of births has fallen annually, and deaths are now outpacing births. There were only 1.22 million live births last year — marginally above the 1999 low. Demographer Alexei Raksha reported the number of babies born in Russia in February 2025 was the lowest monthly figure in over two centuries.
Russia is trying new restrictions to halt the backslide and embrace what it calls “traditional family values” with laws banning the promotion of abortion and “child-free ideology” and outlawing all LGBTQ+ activism.
Officials believe such values are “a magic wand” for solving demographic problems, said Russian feminist scholar Sasha Talaver.
In the government’s view, women might be financially independent, but they should be “willing and very excited to take up this additional work of reproduction in the name of patriotism and Russian strength,” she said.
 

Harsh demographic history
In Russia, as in much of the West, shrinking births are usually linked with economic turbulence. Young couples in cramped apartments, unable to buy their own homes or who fear for their jobs, usually have less confidence they can afford raising a child.
But Russia is saddled with a harsh demographic history.
About 27 million Soviet citizens died in World War II, diminishing the male population dramatically.
As the country was beginning to recover, the Soviet Union collapsed, and births tumbled again.
The number of Russian women in their 20s and early 30s is small, said Jenny Mathers of the University of Aberystwyth in Wales, leaving authorities “desperate to get as many babies as possible out of this much smaller number of women.”
Although Russia has not said how many troops have been killed in Ukraine, Western estimates have put the dead in the hundreds of thousands. When the war began, many young Russians moved abroad — some for ideological reasons like escaping a crackdown on dissent or to avoid military service.
“You’ve got a much-diminished pool of potential fathers in a diminished pool of potential mothers,” Mathers said. That is a particular problem for Putin, who has long linked population and national security, she said.

Some family-friendly initiatives are popular, like cash certificates for parents that can go toward pensions, education or a subsidized mortgage.
Others are controversial, such as one-time payments of about $1,200 for pregnant teenagers in some regions. Officials say these aim to support vulnerable mothers, but critics say they encourage such pregnancies.
Still other programs seem mostly symbolic. Since 2022, Russia has created state holidays like Family, Love and Fidelity Day in July, and Pregnant Women’s Day -– celebrated on April 7 and Oct. 7.
Last year, Russia’s fertility rate — the average number of children born per woman — was 1.4, state media reported. That’s well below the 2.1 replacement rate for the population, and slightly lower than the US figure of 1.6 released by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.
Discouraging abortion
Some regions have laws making it illegal to “encourage abortions,” while national legislation in 2024 banned the promotion of “child-free propaganda.” The wording in such initiatives is often vague, leaving them open to interpretation, but the change was enough to prompt producers of a reality TV hit “16 and Pregnant” to change the show’s name to “Mommy at 16.”

For many women, the measures make already sensitive conversations even more fraught. A 29-year-old woman who’s decided not to bear children told The Associated Press she sees a gynecologist at a private Moscow clinic, rather than a state one, to avoid intrusive questions.
“Whether I plan to have children, whether I don’t plan to have children — I don’t get asked about that at all,” she said, speaking on condition of anonymity because she feared repercussions. It’s “a completely different story” at state-run clinics, she said.
An increasing number of laws limit access to abortion. While the procedure remains legal and widely available, more private clinics no longer offer abortion services. New legislation has also curbed the sale of abortion-inducing pills, a move that also affects some emergency contraceptives.
Women are encouraged to go to state clinics, where waits are longer and some sites refuse to do abortions on certain days. By the time patients have completed compulsory counseling and mandatory waiting periods of between 48 hours and a week, they risk surpassing the time frame for a legal abortion.

Abortions have steadily decreased under these laws, although experts say the number of procedures already was falling. Still, there hasn’t been a corresponding increase in births, and activists believe restricting abortion will only harm the health of women and children.
“The only thing you will get from this is illegal abortions. That means more deaths: more children’s deaths and more women’s deaths,” says Russian journalist and feminist activist Zalina Marshenkulova.
She sees the new government limits as repression for repression’s sake. “They exist just to ban, to block any voice of freedom,” she told AP.
Curbing immigration
Russia could increase its population by allowing more immigrants — something the Kremlin is unlikely to adopt.
Russian officials have recently fomented anti-migrant sentiment, tracking their movements, clamping down on their employment and impeding their children’s rights to education. Central Asians who have traditionally traveled to Russia for work are looking elsewhere, hoping to avoid growing discrimination and economic uncertainty.
While the war in Ukraine continues, Moscow can promise financial rewards for would-be parents but not the stability needed for gambling on the future.
When people lack confidence about their prospects, it’s not a time for having children, Mathers said, adding: “An open-ended major war doesn’t really encourage people to think positively about the future.”
The 29-year-old woman who chose not to have children agrees.
“The happiest and healthiest child will only be born in a family with healthy, happy parents,” she said.

Shutdowns began as a way to enforce federal law. Now Trump is using it to take more power
WASHINGTON: The government shutdown, already the second-longest in history, with no end in sight, is quickly becoming a way for President Donald Trump to exercise new command over the government.
It wasn’t always this way. In fact, it all started with an attempt to tighten Washington’s observance of federal law.
The modern phenomena of the US government closing down services began in 1980 with a series of legal opinions from Attorney General Benjamin Civiletti, who was serving under Democratic President Jimmy Carter. Civiletti reached into the Antideficiency Act of 1870 to argue that the law was “plain and unambiguous” in restricting the government from spending money once authority from Congress expires.

In this shutdown, however, the Republican president has used the funding lapse to punish Democrats, tried to lay off thousands of federal workers and seized on the vacuum left by Congress to reconfigure the federal budget for his priorities.
“I can’t believe the Radical Left Democrats gave me this unprecedented opportunity,” Trump posted on his social media platform at the outset of the shutdown.
Democrats have only dug into their positions.
It’s all making this fight that much harder to resolve and potentially redefining how Washington will approach funding lapses altogether.
Why does the US government even have shutdowns?
In the post-Watergate years, Civiletti’s tenure at the Department of Justice was defined by an effort to restore public trust in Washington, sometimes with strict interpretations of federal law.
When a conflict between Congress and the Federal Trade Commission led to a delay in funding legislation for the agency, Civiletti issued his opinion, later following it up with another opinion that allowed the government to perform essential services.
He did not know that it would set the groundwork for some of the most defining political battles to come.
“I couldn’t have ever imagined these shutdowns would last this long of a time and would be used as a political gambit,” Civiletti, who died in 2022, told The Washington Post six years ago.
How shutdowns evolved
For the next 15 years, there were no lengthy government shutdowns. In 1994, Republicans retook Congress under House Speaker Newt Gingrich of Georgia and pledged to overhaul Washington. Their most dramatic standoffs with Democratic President Bill Clinton were over government shutdowns.
Historians mostly agree the shutdowns did not work, and Clinton was able to win reelection in part by showing he stood up to Gingrich.

“The Republicans in the Gingrich-era, they do get some kind of limited policy victories, but for them overall it’s really kind of a failure,” said Mike Davis, adjunct professor of history at Lees-McRae College.
There was one more significant shutdown in 2013 when tea party Republicans sparred with Democratic President Barack Obama. But it was not until Trump’s first term that Democrats adopted the tactic of extended government shutdowns.
How is this shutdown different?
During previous funding lapses, presidential administrations applied the rules governing shutdowns equally to affected agencies.
“A shutdown was supposed to close the same things under Reagan as under Clinton,” said Charles Tiefer, a former acting general counsel for the House and a professor emeritus at the University of Baltimore School of Law. He said that in this shutdown, the Trump administration has used “a kind of freewheeling presidential appropriation power, which is contrary to the whole system, the original Constitution, and the Antideficiency Act.”
The administration has introduced a distinctly political edge to the funding fight, with agencies updating their websites to include statements blaming Democrats for the shutdown. The Department of Defense has tapped research and development funds to pay active-duty service members. Trump has tried to initiate layoffs for more than 4,000 federal employees who are mostly working in areas perceived to be Democratic priorities.
During a luncheon at the White House with GOP senators this week, Trump introduced his budget director Russ Vought as “Darth Vader” and bragged how he is “cutting Democrat priorities and they’re never going to get them back.”
Democrats have only been emboldened by the strategy, voting repeatedly against a Republican-backed bill to reopen the government. They argue that voters will ultimately hold Republicans accountable for the pain of the shutdown because the GOP holds power in Washington.
Democrats are confident they have chosen a winning policy demand on health care plans offered under Affordable Care Act marketplaces, but there is an undercurrent that they are also fighting to halt Trump’s expansion of presidential power.

Sen. Tim Kaine, D-Virginia, acknowledged that his state has more to lose than perhaps any other due to the large number of federal employees and activity based there. But he argued that his constituents are fed up with a “nonstop punishment parade” from Trump that has included layoffs, cancelation of money for economic development projects, pressure campaigns against universities and the dismissal of the US attorney for Virginia.
“It kind of stiffens folks’ spines,” Kaine said.
Democratic resolve will be tested in the coming week. Federal employees, including lawmakers’ own staff, have now gone almost an entire month without full paychecks. Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program, or SNAP, which helps about 1 in 8 Americans buy groceries, faces a potential funding cliff on Nov. 1. Air travel delays threaten to only grow worse amid air traffic controller shortages.
Sen. Angus King, I-Maine, said he hopes his colleagues start negotiating quickly to end the impasse.
He said he’s been one of the few members of the Democratic caucus to vote for ending the shutdown because “it empowers the president beyond what he would be able to do otherwise, and it damages the country.”