Ivan Krastev, chair of the Center for Liberal Strategies in Bulgaria, and Stephen Holmes, a law professor at New York University, argue President Vladimir Putin’s obsession with Russia’s demographic decline may be the key.
In an analysis in Foreign Policy magazine on Dec. 6, they drew a parallel with “mourning wars” during the 17th and 18th centuries, when Native American tribes kidnapped women and children from other tribes to offset losses from wars or disease.
“In many ways, it resembles an updated version of such a war, a desperate attempt to replenish a dwindling population by forcibly incorporating a neighboring people into Russia’s own,” Krastev and Holmes wrote. “While the invasion was undoubtedly sparked by imperialist ambitions, anti-Western resentment, and a desire for Great Power recognition, it may also have been conditioned by Russia’s rapidly shrinking, aging, and emigrating population.”
https://fortune.com/2024/12/15/russia-population-crisis-vladimir-putin-ukraine-invasion-demographic-trends/
