Russia's War Is a Failed Answer to Its Demographic Crisis
For decades, Vladimir Putin has warned that Russia is on the path to extinction. His war has killed untold numbers of people — but it’s also an attempt to force millions of people into Russian citizenship.
“The demographic doom loop has not, it appears, diminished Mr Putin’s craving for conquest. But it is rapidly making Russia a smaller, worse-educated and poorer country, from which young people flee and where men die in their 60s.” So concludes a recent Economist article about the demographic situation in Russia, a year into its invasion of Ukraine. However, what the British weekly isn’t counting — unlike the Russian government — are the approximately two million Crimeans who received Russian citizenship after the annexation in 2014. It also fails to mention the over 2.8 million Ukrainians who had to move to Russia since the beginning of the invasion, the more than one million people from the Donetsk and Luhansk regions who had to move to Russia over the last eight years of war, as well as those who have stayed in the occupied territories, and are currently lining up to receive Russian citizenship.
But these people matter — and including them in an analysis of the invasion and its consequences is crucial. As I will show here, managing the demographic crisis — part of a broader crisis of the reproduction of Russian society itself — can be understood as one of the key reasons behind the invasion. Before February 24, 2022, Ukrainians constituted the key ethnic group among those acquiring Russian citizenship and coming to the country as labor migrants. Now, the Kremlin uses forcefully displaced Ukrainians to refill the population pool with educated, predominantly Slavic, Russian-speaking new citizens. It is no coincidence that Putin repeats that Ukrainians do not exist as a separate nation — they, according to him, should be integrated into Russian citizenship but in a specially designed category as “second-class” citizens. Now, Putin’s changes to Russian citizenship law have introduced a new category of citizens with acquired citizenship.
Surely, such demographic engineering offers a scary vision of the future envisaged by Putin. But as my analysis shows, it can also help us better conceptualize a biopolitical imperialism, i.e. one “in which death is figuratively exported and life imported back.” That is, we can understand this imperialism in its connection with social reproduction — the replenishment of the Russian population itself.
https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/world/russia-s-war-is-a-failed-answer-to-its-demographic-crisis/ar-AA1ae2Gm
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