On the brink of what promises to be a long war, demography – at least as much as the economy – is proving to be a decisive factor for both Ukraine and Russia to hold out in the long term. Having gambled on the best-prepared elements of a supposedly modernized army in the first weeks of his invasion of Ukraine, Vladimir Putin has had to rely on the mass mobilization of his citizens – revealing the immense and long-standing fragilities of Russian demography.

Yet the head of the Kremlin has placed this issue at the heart of his words and actions since his rise to power at the end of 1999. With his costly family support policies, Putin has made strengthening demography a priority, even an obsession. He reiterated it in his address to the nation in 2020: "Russia's destiny and its historical prospects depend on one thing: how many of us there are and how many of us there will be."

Despite the paramount importance of the issue for the authorities, or perhaps precisely because of it, Russian demographic data are shrouded in the utmost vagueness and treated as a government secret – including the basic fact of Russia's overall population. The statistical agency Rosstat, the authority on the subject, estimated the figure at 146,447,424 as of January 1. It's an embarrassing finding for Putin, given that it is less than in 1999.

Rosstat's figure includes the population of Crimea, annexed in 2014 and now approaching 2.5 million, many of whom are "migrants" from Russia. However, the official agency does not include the regions annexed from Ukraine in September 2022: Donetsk, Luhansk, Zaporizhzhia and Kherson. This "omission" is a reminder of the eminently political nature of the issue. It is impossible for Moscow and international institutions to agree on a basic figure.

But even if the occupied regions are included, their contribution to Russia's overall demography is beyond uncertain. Not only does the Russian army hold only part of the territories it has claimed (the cities of Zaporizhzhia and Kherson, among others, are in Kyiv's hands), but they have been emptied of their population.

Rosstat has made no estimates, but the election commissions rely on data from the Ukrainian era – which underlines the entirely fanciful nature of the turnout figures announced for the pseudo-referendum on annexation in September 2022 and the local elections in September 2023.

Even more fanciful are the unofficial estimates of the Russian population, such as that of the Komsomolskaya Pravda daily newspaper, which proposes 154 million. The newspaper estimates the population of Luhansk Oblast at 4.1 million, while Ukraine's own figure is limited to 1.4 million.

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