Russia’s demographic outlook has tightened since Salavat Abylkalikov’s September 2025 warning that the country’s latest downturn is more acute than the late-1990s crisis because inward migration is no longer cushioning natural population loss.
In the months since, new reporting and Russian research have reinforced three points: fertility is edging lower, the labour market is tightening under ageing and wartime pressures, and official data has become harder to interpret as publication gaps widen.
The basic arithmetic remains unfavourable. Rosstat’s widely cited 2024 birth total was about 1.22 million, close to the post-Soviet low recorded in 1999. Early 2025 did not show a decisive break in trend. Rosstat updates cited in Russian media put first-quarter births at 288,800.
More recent indicators point to a further slide in fertility. Vedomosti and Kommersant, citing Rosstat operational data, reported that the total fertility rate by December 2025 had fallen to 1.374, down from around 1.4 a year earlier. The direction matters because Russia is entering a period when the cohort of women of childbearing age is shrinking, a structural constraint repeatedly highlighted by Russian demographers.
Long-range official projections have also been restated in Russian policy discussions. A Russian Academy of Sciences (RAS) presidium meeting on demographic forecasting in October 2025 cited Rosstat’s “medium” scenario in which the population could be about 138.8 million by early 2046, alongside assumptions including a total fertility rate of 1.66 and rising life expectancy. Rosstat’s “low” scenario, as reported by Kommersant, envisages population falling to about 130.6 million over the same horizon (excluding the four annexed Ukrainian regions in that comparison).
A 2025 comparative paper from Russia’s Institute of Economic Forecasting (ECfor) set Rosstat’s scenarios alongside the UN’s World Population Prospects 2024 and other international models, arguing that the range between Rosstat’s low and medium trajectories is the more plausible corridor under current conditions. It also underlined that migration is the most difficult component to measure and forecast, and noted that Rosstat’s medium and low variants rely on relatively steady net migration levels aligned with the previous decade’s average.
Migration, however, is now sending mixed signals. Russian authorities continue to record large numbers of foreign workers using the patent system: TASS reported that nearly 2.3 million foreign citizens worked under patents in 2025, up from about 2.1 million in 2024, with the largest concentrations in Moscow, the Moscow region and St Petersburg. At the same time, multiple analyses since 2024 have described a harsher operating environment for Central Asian migrants following the Crocus City Hall attack and a wider tightening of controls. The key demographic question is not whether Russia can still attract migrant labour in absolute numbers, but whether net inflows can be sustained at levels that materially offset natural decline while the domestic working-age population contracts.
The labour-market implications are increasingly visible. Le Monde reported in mid-2025 that Russia faces structural workforce gaps driven by ageing, wartime recruitment and low unemployment, with government plans implying the need to add millions of workers by 2030. In this context, even modest changes in migration flows or participation rates can have outsized effects on sectors such as construction, transport and services.
War losses add a further demographic drag, concentrated among men of working and reproductive age. Mediazona’s open-source tally, updated on 16 January 2026, listed more than 163,600 confirmed Russian military deaths by name, while stressing that the true total is higher because not all deaths are publicly recorded. Separate Western estimates, such as a January 2026 CSIS-based assessment reported by AP, place total Russian casualties far higher when wounded and missing are included, though such figures are not directly comparable to name-verified counts. For demography, the distinction is important: deaths reduce cohort size outright, while large numbers of wounded can reduce labour supply through disability and long-term health effects.
Finally, data transparency has itself become part of the story. In July 2025 Mediazona reported interruptions to Rosstat’s monthly releases on births and deaths and the disappearance of migration data from some routine publications. Later in 2025, the data-tracking project “If To Be Accurate” said hundreds of datasets were removed or stopped updating, with demographic indicators among the most affected. This does not change underlying trends, but it complicates independent verification and widens the uncertainty bands around forecasts.
Taken together, later research and reporting broadly supports Abylkalikov’s core argument: Russia is re-entering a down-cycle with lower fertility, an older population and a less dependable migration buffer.
