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Comment by rippercushions | Hacker News Reader

It's noteworthy that Russia is one of the worst in terms of demographics, yet they're busily slaughtering their youth in Ukraine and driving their remaining talent overseas.

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I suspect Russia’s demographic crisis was a factor in Putin’s invasion. He’s an old-fashioned imperialist and hates to reign over a shrinking, aging population.

Annexing Ukraine would have increased Russia’s population from 144M to 188M overnight. A great legacy for Vladimir the Cunning, in his dreams.

They are definitely attempting for a demographic darwin award.

Putin keeps talking about an existential crisis for Russia. He's right. Except the crisis is at home. Even before the war, Russian population was shrinking in size. Now with the war, he's basically losing a generation and massively speeding up the process. I've heard some comments stating that from a demographic point of view, this is the last generation even capable of pulling together an army the size that Russia is currently deploying. Next generations will be too small in numbers. As the older generations die out, Russia will have a much smaller population than it used to.

This makes for a grim reading: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Demographics_of_Russia

Despite abortions going down, population decreased by 1M people last year. The average age has dropped a few years. Population size basically peaked right after the wall came down and has trended down ever since. With the exception of a few years, growth rate was negative every year since.

well, the absolute grimmest, darkest and shittiest time, demography-wise or any other aspect really, was 1999 with fertility rate of 1.16, which somehow coincided with the peak of the official mad euphoria for the West and Yeltsin's drunken man-crush on his "friend Bill".

Currently, the fertility rate is on par with the US and most of the other urbanized world, life expectancy is up by whopping 8 years since then (not counting the Covid). That one million of lives lost is due to Covid and it seems like the country is pretty much in the same boat as everyone else now, slowly withering away.

it was now or never.

similar scary calculation for china and taiwan.

Putin won't be alive to see the long-term impacts of his choices now.

The more damaging to Russia is actually the reports that they may soon be mobilising university students [1].

That would wipe out an entire generation of future business leaders, entrepreneurs, professionals etc.

[1] https://news.yahoo.com/russia-prepares-mass-mobilisation-ful...

> During the Vietnam War era, between 1964 and 1973, the U.S. military drafted 2.2 million American men out of an eligible pool of 27 million.

^ college students included

Relevant:

TIL that 30,000 American draft dodgers went to Canada during the Vietnam War, while 30,000 Canadians joined the US military to fight in the Vietnam War <https://np.reddit.com/r/todayilearned/comments/6o1b3f/til_th...>

59,000 American died during 10 years of US's involvement.

More than 100,000 Russians and counting have died since the war started exactly a year ago. 20 times the casualty rate.

where did you get this number?

Yeh sure but they did the same and worse 80 years ago and are still fine.

Russian women er pretty amazing.

I'd argue about the "are still fine" part. My country was under soviet occupation. We were so behind that it's beyond scary. A plastic bag with Bruce Willis or Stallone's face printed on it was something out of this word. I'd argue that by the time the whole darn thing collapsed, we were 20-30 years behind the western world.

80 years ago Russia was defending against an actual invasion of actual Nazis, instead of inventing fake Nazis as a pretense for invading.

It distorted Russian society in ways that are still felt today. So no, it wasn't still fine.

Is Russia "fine"? They still haven't managed to catch up economically or in development levels to the developed Western countries (and the fact that former Eastern bloc and even Soviet countries have shows that the gap wasn't impossible to overcome). They're also in a war they cannot win losing tens of thousands of men they can ill afford to lose, and only because they're stuck in the past politically and geopolitically.

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