Russia has fallen to the level of Haiti in terms of male life expectancy

The spiral of demographic catastrophe in Russia continues to unfold, despite trillions of dollars in budget spending for the national project “Demography” and the president’s demands to halt the population decline.

The average life expectancy of men in the Russian Federation in 2019-21 fell by almost 5 years – to 64.2 years, writes The Economist, citing official statistics.

On average, Russians live “long” as in Haiti and 6 years less than in Bangladesh. Compared to Japan, the life expectancy of Russian men is 18 years lower.

Covid mortality and alcoholism in poor regions meant that at the beginning of 2022 there were 10 million fewer men than women in Russia. The war with Ukraine, mass mobilization and emigration on a scale unprecedented since the last years of the USSR herald further descent into the demographic abyss, writes The Economist.

In 2020-22, the natural loss of the population of the Russian Federation reached 2.3 million people – so much so that the death rate exceeded the birth rate, the level of which updates 20-year lows.

On average, the rate of population extinction reached 2.1 thousand. people per day. The influx of migrants compensated less than half of this process, and the overall population decreased from 146.7 to 145.6 million people in three years. Moreover, the largest decline was in ethnic Russian regions, whose population fell by 5.4 million people between 2010-21, notes The Economist.

The UN Department of Economic and Social Affairs predicts that by 2050 Russia’s population will fall to 133 million people – to the level of the RSFSR in the early 1970s (130 million) or the Russian Empire in 1897 (129 million).

Losing an average of 316,000 people per year, Russia will fly out of the top 10 countries in the world in terms of population, overtaking, for example, Ethiopia and Mexico, according to the forecast.