July 30, 2025:
Russia is running out of Russians. The Ukraine War hasn’t helped, with losses of over a million dead, badly wounded and deserters. Millions more fled the country to avoid getting mobilized into the military to die in Ukraine.
There are increasing problems with labor shortages while millions of Russians work in the untaxed and unregulated informal economy. There are multiple reasons for these problems. Since the 1990s the population has been shrinking because of declining birth rates. Since the 2022 invasion of Ukraine, foreign workers have stopped entering Russia or left because so many of them were coerced into the Russian army. All this led to labor shortages that are currently 20 percent and rising.
Some practical solutions were considered. One was to make it easier for those working in the shadow economy to join the legal workforce. Another was to enforce laws mandating equal pay for women doing the same jobs as men. This will encourage many childless wives who remain as homemakers to return to work. These same programs might even encourage students to take part-time jobs.
Another proposal, which is more difficult to implement, is eliminating the lack of well-paid jobs for non-Slav Russians. One popular solution is to equalize pay rates for everyone. There are at least 15 million Russians who could be added to the workforce if these measures are successful. Another popular measure would be ending the war in Ukraine, but the government will not touch that, at least not yet. By the end of the year the war may be over because Russia has run out soldiers and increasing economic sanctions risk destroying the economy.
Neighbors will see this as an improvement in their security because for centuries Russia was considered a threat to its neighbors by virtue of there being more Russians. Since the Soviet Union fell apart in 1991 and half the population broke away to form 14 new nations, the remaining Russian population has been in decline. Twenty years after the Soviet Union collapsed, the Russian population implosion was getting worse. While in the 1990s the population was shrinking at a rate of 0.1 percent a year, in the last decade that has increased to 0.2 percent a year. This is because the non-Slav Russians are having fewer children, just as the Slavs have been doing or, rather, not doing for decades. The Russian population has declined three percent since 1989, from 147 to 142 million. The proportion of the population that is ethnic Slav Russian has declined from 81 percent to 75 percent.
The rapidly aging Russian population is not only shrinking but is not fit for any major economic or military efforts. During the last decade it was discovered that some 60 percent of Russians are elderly, children, or disabled. Out of 20 million males of working age, one million are in prison, a million are in the armed forces including paramilitaries, five million are unemployed or unemployable due to poor education, health, or attitude, four million are chronic alcoholics, and over a million are drug addicts.
Thus there is something of a labor shortage, with plenty of jobs for women and immigrants. The birth rate is below replacement level and a declining population means more immigrants just to keep things going. Improving medical care and health habits, especially treating alcoholism and drug use, is a government priority, in order to raise the lifespan of Russian males. That has had some success, and in urban areas you see more Russians out running and going to the many newly built private gyms. But these improvements are not happening quickly enough to reverse the population decline.
If this trend is not reversed, Russia will continue to have a smaller and less Russian population.
One solution is ending the Ukraine War. It is in its fourth year with no end in sight. This has become a serious problem for Russia, where popular support for the Special Operation in Ukraine is plummeting. Seeking another solution, Russia sought to glorify military service in Ukraine and came up with an incentive program called Time of Heroes. This involved organizing special training for veterans, to train them for government jobs. This program immediately ran into problems because many returning veterans were anti-social and a growing number were derelicts, drug addicts or active criminals either because they were that way before entering the army or military service made them that, plus all the heroes had been killed. Enough stable veterans were found for the first class of future bureaucrats. Most veterans were not interested in working for a government owned firm or local government. The criminal life was more lucrative and had more use for combat veterans’ skills. The veterans who had given up usually
Another problem was that Russia eventually emptied its prisons to obtain new soldiers. This worked until reports reached undecided prisoners that joining the army often got you killed. It was safer in prison, where you would eventually be released. Now the government fears that when the Ukraine War ends, several hundred thousand soldiers will be discharged into a Russian economy that has been ravaged by international economic sanctions and a conversion to mainly military production at the expense of consumer goods. Returning heroes will not be pleased if they become unemployed civilians with few job prospects.
Russia faced this problem before. When the Soviet Union collapsed, so did the economy of the newly independent Russia. It took years for the economy to recover. The collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991 left Russia as the largest, wealthiest, and most populous of the fourteen new states that emerged after the demise of the Soviet empire. At first the prospects for the new Russian Federation looked bright. That did not last long because population growth ended in 1993.
Desperate to deal with this problem, Russia invaded neighboring Ukraine in 2014 and 2022. While Ukrainians share many characteristics with Russians, like customs, education levels, and similar languages, Russian rule was not wanted. For centuries Ukrainians have held on to their desire for independence. Russian domination, misrule and mismanagement of the economy led to the collapse of the Soviet Union and an opportunity for forty million Ukrainians to finally regain self-rule. That lasted for 23 years before the Russians decided they could solve their declining population problem by rebuilding their empire, starting with the 40 million Ukrainians. Russia initially believed that most Ukrainians would welcome this and ignore their plans to join the European Union and NATO. The Ukrainians disagreed and fought the Russians to a ruinous, for Russia, standstill. Substantial military and economic aid from NATO enabled the Ukrainians to stop the Russians and eventually expel them.
The Russian government then outlawed emigration to avoid military service but has not been able to enforce the new law. All this means that the Russian population is rapidly approaching 138 million and, unless Russia wins or abandons the Ukraine war, the Russian population will continue to shrink. Nearly all the lost men were part of the workforce and so many men are now gone that the Russian economy suffers from a significant labor shortage.
Eventually a growing number of Russian soldiers refused to fight in Ukraine. This led to tense standoffs between reluctant soldiers and their officers who have been told to shoot soldiers refusing to fight. This didn’t go well because the soldiers in question were also armed and inclined to shoot back, or shoot first, and then leave the war. These deserters could not go home because the military police would be waiting for them. Many deserters left the country or went to some remote part of Russia where they would not be noticed or bothered. Importing men from remote parts of Russia with promises of jobs and no forced service in the army did not work. Memories are long when it comes to life and death situations, and the trustworthiness of government promises. By 2025 Russia had an escalating shortage of soldiers and workers. Russia was losing the war because of that, and the economy was limping along because of the labor shortage.
The failure of the Time of Heroes program and a similar effort to indoctrinate high school students also failed. Some of the students were attracted to the pro-war Time of Heroes effort, until internet inquiries revealed the reality of the war. The emergence of the internet in the 1990s was initially seen as a promising new tool by Russian propaganda specialists. It was a false promise because widespread access to the internet meant anyone could make inquiries about new government programs. Deceptive internet commentators, often working for the Russian government, were eventually revealed to be false prophets of whatever idea or program the government was promoting.
The Time of Heroes turned into the Time of Zeroes and left Russian propagandists looking for another way to deceive Russians in general and military age men in particular.