Russia’s birth rate this year is expected to be the lowest in three decades, according to a demographics specialist at the Russian Academy of Sciences. Vadim Bezverbny called for a “systemic approach” to resolving the problem in an interview with the Eurasian News Agency published on Tuesday.
The outlook remains largely pessimistic as the population could decline by 6.2 million people by 2050, he said, citing various estimates.
“We have the statistics for January to October. Honestly, we are close to record low for birth rates. There is a likelihood that 2024 will end with the lowest figure in the last 30 years. Compared to last year, the birth rate has decreased by 3%,” the specialist said.
Bezverbny called for what he described as a “systemic approach” to demographic policy that should include measures to provide young families with affordable housing, increased social benefits for families with children and opportunities for women who gave birth to many children to go into retirement earlier.
With the right set of policies, Russia could get its population back to the level of 145 million by 2100 after a potentially inevitable decline in the coming years, Bezverbny stated.
According to Russia’s state statistics agency, Rosstat, the nation’s population at the beginning of this year was just above 146 million.
The World Health Organization puts Russia’s population at just over 145 million and projects it to fall by almost 10 million to 136.1 million by 2050.
Last month, the Kremlin raised the alarm over Russia’s shrinking population, with spokesperson Dmitry Peskov calling the demographic decline a “huge challenge” for the nation. President Vladimir Putin also said last week that it was “an extremely important matter” and one of the “key issues for Russia.”
The president pointed out, however, that Russia is not the only country facing such issues. Norway’s figures roughly match those of Russia, while Finland, Spain, Japan, and South Korea all have even lower birth rates.
U.S. President-elect Donald Trump and Russian President Vladimir Putin are expected to hold a phone call “in the coming days and weeks,” Trump’s nominee for national security advisor, Mike Waltz, said Jan. 12. However, Putin’s foreign policy aide Yuri Ushakov, as cited by TASS, claimed on Jan. 17 that there have been no contacts “as of today” between Moscow and Trump’s team on the organization of his possible meeting with Putin. Ushakov also said Russia will be represented at Trump’s inauguration by its chargé d’affaires in the U.S. only if the Russian diplomat is invited to attend the ceremony.
Ukraine and Russia are holding limited talks in Qatar about rules to shield nuclear facilities from being targeted, a person familiar with the Kremlin’s preparations told Bloomberg. A spokesman for the Kremlin declined to comment on Bloomberg’s report, but if accurate, the report raises the question of whether the rules would protect substations connecting nuclear facilities to the grid, which Russia has been targeting even as it was reportedly refraining from direct attacks on the three Ukrainian energy-generating nuclear plants. Ukraine has become dependent on these three plants for two–thirds of the country’s electricity generation, so the destruction of the substations that connect these three NPPs to the grid could cause significant pain, not only for the economy—including military-related production—but also for the population. In 2024, electricity outages in Ukraine lasted almost 1,951 hours (so 5.5 hours a day), according to Ukraine’s Dixi Group. Electricity outages lasted 226 hours in the period of Dec. 1–Dec. 13, according to this group.*
In the past month, Russian forces made a net gain of 172 square miles in Ukraine (the rough equivalent of 7 1/2 Manhattan islands), according to the Jan. 15, 2025, issue of the Russia-Ukraine War Report Card that is based on data provided for that period by the Institute for the Study of War. As of Jan. 16, 2025, 18.55% of Ukraine’s territory was under Russian occupation, according to Ukraine’s DeepState OSINT group’s interactive map.
The IMF’s latest World Economic Outlook anticipates Russia’s economic growth will slow from 3.8% in 2024 to 1.4% in 2025 and 1.2% in 2026. In comparison, world output grew by 3.2% in 2024 and is expected to grow by 3.3% in 2025 and then another 3.3% in 2026. As the table below shows, Russia’s rate of growth will be lower in 2025–2026 than that of China, India, the U.S., advanced economies as a whole and developing economies as a whole.
Russia’s Vladimir Putin and Iran’s Masoud Pezeshkian signed a treaty on “comprehensive strategic partnership” between their countries on Jan. 17. The new treaty, which runs for 20 years, aims to strengthen Tehran and Moscow’s “military-political and trade-economic” relations, the Kremlin said, according to RFE/RL. The signing of the Treaty on Comprehensive Strategic Partnership Between the Russian Federation and the Islamic Republic of Iran has been expected by officials in Moscow and Teheran, as well as by watchers of the relationship between the two countries, since at least last fall. But when Vladimir Putin and Masoud Pezeshkian inked the deal in the Kremlin on Jan. 17, it came as an anti-climax of a sorts for those in Russia and Iran that expected a significant strengthening of the two countries’ geopolitical alignment from the treaty. Even though last year saw Putin twice refer to Iran as Russia’s ally at one and the same event in October 2024, while Pezeshkian did the same in July 2024, the text of the treaty, as published by the Kremlin, contains no reference to Russia and Iran being allied. Nor does it have a clause for mutual military aid of the kind that can be found in the 2024 Treaty on Comprehensive Strategic Partnership bbetween the Russian Federation and the Democratic People’s Republic of North Korea. The names of both treaties use the same words to describe the bilateral relationship, but the level of military relationship that the two accords provide for differs. The 2024 Russian-DPRK agreement states: “In the event of an immediate threat of an act of armed aggression against one of the Parties, the Parties, at the request of one of the Parties, shall immediately engage bilateral channels to conduct consultations with the aim of coordinating their positions and agreeing on possible practical measures to assist each other in helping to eliminate the threat that has arisen.” In contrast, the 2025 Russian-Iranian treaty says: “In the event that one of the Parties is subjected to aggression, the other Contracting Party shall not provide any military or other assistance to the aggressor that would facilitate the continuation of aggression, and shall assist in ensuring that the differences that arise are settled on the basis of the Charter of the United Nations and other applicable norms of international law.” We have also gone through references to military and military-technical cooperation in the Russian-Iranian treaty and found none that would call for mutual military aid in the event of aggression. Neither does the treaty’s text refer to the signatories as allies or say they have allied relations, even though Iran is helping Russia’s aggression against Ukraine by supplying hundreds of drones. It should be noted that the 2024 Russian-North Korean treaty did not contain such “allied” references either, but overall, Moscow and Pyongyang are considerably closer to being military allies than Moscow is with Teheran, if only because thousands of DPRK soldiers are presently engaged in direct combat on the Russian side against the Ukrainian forces in the Kursk region, shedding blood on the frontline [this has been alleged but not proven – Natylie]. No other country does that for Russia, even though at least four countries have signed bilateral treaties or declarations that designate them as Russia’s allies.
In recent months, a remarkable development in the Empire’s decline has gone almost entirely unnoticed. The National Endowment for Democracy’s grant database has been removed from the web. Until recently, a searchable interface allowed visitors to view detailed records of Washington-funded NGOs, civil society groups, and media projects in particular countries – covering most of the world – the sums involved, and entities responsible for delivering these initiatives. This resource has now inexplicably vanished, and with it, enormous amounts of incontrovertible, self-incriminating evidence of destructive US skullduggery abroad.
Take for example NED grant records for Georgia, the site of recent repeated colour revolution efforts, at the forefront of which were Endowment-bankrolled organisations. While still accessible via internet archives, they were deleted during the summer. Today, visitors to associated URLs are redirected to a brief entry simply titled “Eurasia”. The accompanying text describes in very broad terms the Endowment’s aims regionally and the total being spent, but the crucial questions of where and on what aren’t clarified. In a comic hypocrisy too, the blurb boldly states:
“The heart of NED’s work in the region is the need to maintain access to objective information for local populations. Across the region, government actors are attempting to limit the space for citizens to distribute information and communicate freely online.”
Resultantly, independent academics, activists, researchers, and journalists have been deprived of an invaluable resource for tracking and exposing the Empire’s machinations. Yet, the Endowment incinerating its public paper trail can only be considered a significant victory for these same actors. NED’s explicit and avowed raison d’être was to do publicly what US intelligence did – and in many cases still does – covertly. Now, after 40 years of wreaking havoc worldwide in service of the Empire, the CIA front has been forced underground, defeating its entire purpose. How long can it now survive?
NED’s ‘Eurasia’ entry
‘Spyless Coups’
NED was founded in November 1983, after the CIA became embroiled in a series of embarrassing public scandals. Then-Agency director William Casey was central to its construction. His objective was to create a public mechanism to conduct traditional CIA meddling overseas, except out in the open. Ever since, the Endowment has financed countless opposition groups, activist movements, media outlets, and trade unions to the tune of untold millions to engage in propaganda and political activism, to disrupt, destabilize, and displace ‘enemy’ regimes the world over.
The NED’s true nature was openly acknowledged by the mainstream media for many years. In June 1986, longtime Endowment president Carl Gershman told the New York Times, “it would be terrible for democratic groups around the world” to be subsidized by the CIA. Past exposure of such connivances meant they had been “discontinued”, and farmed out to NED. Several high-ranking interviewees strenuously denied there was any connection between NED and the Agency, although the outlet acknowledged many Endowment programs seemed “superficially similar” to past CIA operations.
At this time, NED was hard at work killing off Communism in the Soviet Union, Warsaw Pact, and Yugoslavia. This included for instance enormous investment in Poland’s famous Solidarity trade union, which became a global emblem of anti-Communist resistance. In September 1991, the Washington Post published a highly laudatory appraisal of these efforts, stating the “political miracles” the Endowment achieved in the former Soviet sphere had ushered in a “new world of spyless coups” and “innocence abroad”:
“The old era of covert action is dead. The world doesn’t run in secret anymore. We are now living in the age of Overt Action…When such activities are done overtly, the flap potential is close to zero. Openness is its own protection. Covert funding for these groups would have been the kiss of death, if discovered. Overt funding, it would seem, has been a kiss of life.”
NED proceeded to take down a number of governments throughout the 1990s and 2000s, very overtly. In many cases, mainstream outlets published highly revealing accounts detailing precisely how. In Ukraine in November 2004, Endowment-trained and bankrolled activists forced a rerun of that year’s presidential election to install a pro-Western puppet. As The Guardian jubilantly reported, the entire effort was “an American creation” and “sophisticated and brilliantly conceived exercise in Western branding and mass marketing,” which had been repeatedly deployed in the new millennium to “topple unsavoury regimes”:
“Funded and organised by the US government, deploying US consultancies, pollsters, diplomats, the two big American parties and US non-government organisations…the operation – engineering democracy through the ballot box and civil disobedience – is now so slick that the methods have matured into a template for winning other people’s elections.”
‘Kiss of Death’
The next year, USAID published glossy magazine, Democracy Rising, bragging extensively about how it and NED were fundamental to a wave of insurrectionary upheaval in Georgia, Kyrgyzstan, Lebanon, Yugoslavia, and elsewhere during the first years of the 21st century. Fast forward to February 2014, and Ukraine’s government once again fell victim to an Endowment-orchestrated coup, in the form of the Maidan ‘revolution’. Yet, the media either ignored the irrefutable US role in fomenting the upheaval, or dismissed the proposition as “Russian disinformation” or conspiracy theory.
This is despite; contemporary pollsnever showing majority Ukrainian support for the Maidan protests; ousted President Viktor Yanukovych remaining the most popular politician in the country until his last day in office; every actor at Maidan’s forefront, including the individuals who started the demonstrations, receiving NED or USAID funding; leaders of Washington-financed organizations in the countryopenly advertising their desire to overthrow Yanukovych in the years prior; and the Endowment pumping around $20 million into the country in 2013 alone.
A Maidan crowd
This mass omertà, which has intensified since, may be attributable to ever-rising hostility towards NED by foreign governments and populations, and associated efforts to restrict or outright proscribe the organization. The reality of the Endowment’s raison d’être and modus operandi has thus not only become unsayable, but must be vehemently denied by Western journalists. Representatively, aJuly 2015Guardian report on Russia banning NED quite unbelievably relied on a brief quote from the Endowment’s own website to describe its operations.
While the mainstream media may have remained silent on the NED’s mephitic influence overseas over the past decade, the same is not true of dissident academics, activists, researchers, and journalists. The Endowment grant database served as an invaluable tool for keeping a close eye on Washington’s international intrigues, and mapping the personal and organisational connections of NED-sponsorsed agents and entities of influence. Meanwhile, the Enowment’s status as a CIA front could be simply proven, via multiple public admissions of its own leaders.
Whenever protests erupted somewhere in the world and received widespread Western news coverage, concerned citizens could consult the NED grant database and find in the overwhelming majority of cases, most if not all individuals and groups quoted in media reports were in receipt of Endowment funding. While impossible to quantify, it would be unsurprising if dissident voices calling attention to this fact have helped avert colour revolution efforts, disrupted meddling campaigns, protected popular governments and political figures, and more.
Of course, despite NED brazenly purging evidence of its vast operations from the web, that conniving continues apace regardless – now, covertly. One might even argue the Endowment’s chicanery is all the more dangerous resultantly, given individuals and organizations can conceal their funding sources. But the move amply shows NED today cannot withstand the slightest public scrutiny, which its existence was intended to exemplify. It also demonstrates that “overt operations” with open US funding are now the very “kiss of death” the Endowment was meant to replace. The Empire is on the run.
FWIW, I believe Russia will eventually become part of the West. The BRICS and ‘global south’ messaging is top-down; on the ground, nobody talks about it. Russians remain fascinated by Western culture and politics.
Most Russians are far warier of Central Asia and China than the ‘evil West.’ They’d still pick a German car over a Chinese one any day.
When the current psychosis fades, normal ties with the US and EU will likely bring relief. Russia has wanted to be part of that world since 1991. And let’s face it, Western Europe needs Russia economically. Just look at Germany — it’s struggling.
The next generation — on both sides — has no Cold War baggage holding them back. Deep down, the West and Russia are urban, industrial civilizations with shared Christian roots. More alike than different.
