- Some female college students in Russia can now receive payments for giving birth to healthy babies. This comes as the country’s birth rate hit a “catastrophic” low last year while Vladimir Putin’s war on Ukraine has resulted in heavy casualties and a mass exodus.
The new year brings with it new laws in Russia, where nearly a dozen regional governments will now pay female college students to give birth to healthy babies.
In Russia’s northwestern republic of Karelia, for example, lawmakers passed a bill in July to begin payments this year of 100,000 rubles, or about $910 at current exchange rates.
Women must be full-time students at a local university, under 25 years old, and residents of Karelia. But they won’t be paid if the baby is stillborn, according to the independent daily the Moscow Times.
Tomsk in central Russia has a similar incentive, and at least 11 regional governments overall reportedly pay female students for giving birth.
Meanwhile, Russia’s federal government offers maternity payments that went up at the start of the year. First-time mothers can now receive 677,000 rubles ($6,150) in 2025, up from 630,400 last year. And women who have a second child can get 894,000 rubles ($8,130), up from 833,000 rubles.
The payments come as the Kremlin looks for ways to reverse Russia’s ongoing demographic crisis.
During the first half of 2024, just 599,600 children were born in Russia—the lowest in 25 years and 16,000 lower than the same time in 2023. That total included a historically low June, when the monthly birth rate dipped below 100,000 for the first time ever.
“This is catastrophic for the future of the nation,” Kremlin spokesperson Dmitry Peskov said in July.
Russia’s population currently sits at about 146 million, down from 148 million in the early 1990s, and the United Nations has predicted it could collapse to 74 million to 112 million by 2100.
At the same time, Vladimir Putin’s war on Ukraine has resulted in dead and wounded that are estimated to exceed 600,000. The launch of the full-scale invasion in 2022 also prompted more than 1 million Russians, mostly young and educated, to flee the country.
Russia’s efforts to reverse its demographic trends extend beyond financial incentives. The government has also restricted access to abortions and criminalized “child-free” propaganda.
Even a Russian reality TV show modeled on MTV’s 16 and Pregnant changed from depicting cautionary tales about teenage pregnancy to emphasizing the “beauty of motherhood,” according to the Washington Post.
And according to Ivan Krastev, chair of the Center for Liberal Strategies in Bulgaria, and Stephen Holmes, a law professor at New York University, Putin is so obsessed with Russia’s shrinking population that it was a factor in his decision to invade Ukraine.
“Putin understands that, in the world of tomorrow, Russia will be a territorial giant and population dwarf,” they wrote in Foreign Policy magazine last month.