Interesting statistics from Russia on birth rate…
Russia was in demographic decline long before the war in Ukraine. Now it’s in free fall.
Since 2022, hundreds of thousands of Russians have died or suffered critical injuries in Ukraine. The result: According to one demographer, Russians may have had fewer children from January to March 2025 than in any three-month period over the past 200 years. As of 2023, the country’s fertility rate—1.4 births per woman—lies well below replacement level and amounts to a roughly 20 percent drop compared with 2015.
I saw the same article. Their numbers are terrible, but similar to a number of countries in Europe to include Germany, Italy, Ukraine, etc. The lowest numbers are in Asia: China, Japan, Taiwan - with South Korea near the bottom - somewhere in the 1.1 range if not lower. (I saw 0.7 in one estimate.). There are some analysts who argue that the faster a country urbanizes / industrializes, the steeper its demographic decline - and that this surplus of labor gives a nation a generational sugar high of productivity, but only once as the population then begins to decline and not recover.
It is a global phenomena with huge implications on government spending (health care vs defense), lowered domestic consumption with export based economies (China, Germany, etc) forced to sell even more, a lack of manpower for the labor force (industry, armies, etc) - really an unprecedented shift in the human population curve that will have unforseen consequences.
From The Diplomat on South Korea:
How grave is this situation? Imagine a population size of 200, half men and half women. Assuming 70 percent of the women give birth to one child over the course of their lifetime, the population would add 70 children. If half of those (35) are women, and 70 percent of those women had one child, the number of new births would shrink to around 25 in the next generation. That is a whopping 88 percent decrease (from 200 to 25) in just two generations.