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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.”
The U.S.-based Institute for the Study of War (ISW) linked the latest data blackout to the Kremlin’s efforts to “obscure the Russian military’s high personnel loss rate.”
Raksha supported that claim with 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.
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.
Rosstat’s May data blackout comes months after the agency reported just 90,500 births in February — the lowest monthly figure in more than two centuries. Raksha estimates the first quarter of 2025 likely saw the fewest births since the early 1800s.
On Saturday, federal lawmaker Nina Ostanina reposted an appeal by a group of economists calling on the government to explain the missing data and urging Rosstat to resume publication of nationwide birth and death statistics.
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