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Russia’s state statistics agency Rosstat has stopped publishing monthly data on births and deaths, a move that comes amid a deepening demographic crisis and ongoing troop losses in the war against Ukraine.
For the first time, Rosstat last week released its monthly socio-economic report without including figures on births, deaths, migration or the country’s total population.
The agency had already stopped releasing regional breakdowns of births and deaths earlier this year.
“Since March 2025, there’s been virtually no publicly available demographic data in Russia,” demographer Alexei Raksha wrote at the time. “We consider the full suppression of regional demographic statistics a clear sign of failed demographic policy at the regional level.”
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Raksha [cited] internal data from an unnamed region allegedly showing life expectancy for men dropping from 66 years in 2024 to 61 in mid-2025, while life expectancy for women held steady at 75.
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Since launching its full-scale invasion of Ukraine in 2022, Russia has gradually restricted access to demographic data that experts have used to infer wartime casualties, including deaths by age, region and cause.
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