Russia locks up population data with war in Ukraine in its fourth year

President Vladimir Putin has made reversing a decline in the population a priority.

Unlocking a full picture of Russia’s demographic situation is becoming increasingly hard after the state stopped publishing monthly statistics amid the Kremlin’s war against Ukraine.

President Vladimir Putin has made reversing a decline in the population a priority. But gauging progress is complicated by the authorities’ control over the flow of information, including about casualties from the fighting, now well into its fourth year.

The Federal Statistics Service last week published a socio-economic report for the first five months of this year without a traditional section on demography. The latest available data is for the first quarter of 2025, when the number of deaths in the country as a whole significantly exceeded the number of births.

“Starting from March 2025, there are almost no public demographic statistics,” said independent demographer Alexey Raksha. The statistics in full are available only to state experts, who analyze them with the stamp “for official use only,” he said.

Rosstat, as the statistics service is known, and the Economy Ministry, which oversees it, didn’t respond to requests for comment.

Russia doesn’t disclose casualties from the war and the appraisals differ. While Western sources put the figure around 1 million, some Russian sources estimate them at about 200,000.

Last year, births fell to 1.22 million people — the lowest level since 1999 — while deaths increased by an annual 3.3% to 1.82 million, according to data released earlier this year by Rosstat. The pace of the population decline accelerated by roughly 20% compared to 2023, due in part to the war.

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Russia has been consistently closing demographic statistics. In 2020, during the Covid pandemic, Rosstat stopped publishing operational data on mortality by cause.

Since the start of the war in 2022, the service has reduced the detail of mortality statistics. In May 2025, Rosstat ceased publication of data on birth rates and other demographic statistics.

Annual data might still become available, but the decision to stop publishing monthly information limits the scope for analysis, according to independent demographer Igor Efremov. Demographic data suppressed in the late 1960s or early 1970s in the Soviet Union due to falling life expectancy were only made available again toward the end of the 1980s, he said.

“It’s difficult to say how long the data will be closed off,” Efremov said from Moscow. “In the current case, all the unavailable data may be published a year after the end of military operations.”