What does the population pyramid for Russia look like right now?
I'm a little disappointed we haven't seen more separatist fervor. I would think people from, you know, Zabaykalsky, wouldn't be too thrilled about having their young working-age men drafted by Putin to go die on a battlefield 3,500 miles away in the name of protecting the ethnic eastern slavic peoples of Kherson from having to continue living under Ukrainian rule rather than Russian rule.
The population pyramid for Russia is going to look terrible for the next generation and beyond
From last year,
"Russia's 'catastrophic' missing men problem"Continuing with the Ukraine war and mobilization efforts until the end of next spring would be "catastrophic" for Russia, Moscow demographer Igor Efremov told Bloomberg in the fall. It would likely bring birth rates down to 1 million between mid-2023 and mid-2024, dropping the fertility rate to 1.2 children per woman, a low mark Russia hit only once, in the 1999-2000 period. "A fertility rate of 2.1 is needed to keep populations stable without migration," Bloomberg adds, and currently Russia is facing "immigration outflows" and serious questions about its "ability to attract workers from abroad."
And yes, this is going to hit Ukraine as well.
As for why there's not more pro-separatist signs in Russia...
1) Virtually all Russian federal subjects are ruled from Moscow, by Moscow, for Moscow's benefit. (The exceptions are, to the best of my knowledge, Chechnya and Tartarstan. There may be a couple of others.) There is very little political "space" for separatist movements to grow in. If Russia ever does disintegrate, I would expect the disintegration to be rapid, in response to a collapse of the Moscow-based, Putin-run kleptocratic empire post-Soviet Russia became, but in my entirely amateur opinion such collapse/disintegration seems very unlikely in the near future.
2) People in Russia will identify in ways that benefit them. When the Moscow-St Petersburg gang is running a criminal empire for the benefit of ethnic Russians (and focusing on drafting ethnic minorities to send to Ukraine as cannon-fodder) everyone who can is going to identify as Russian. If andwhen the empire does crumble, and ethnic republics surge, I would expect more people to identify with their non-Russian ethnic heritage.
