The Ghost Demographics of Russia: How the Numbers Finally Caught Up with the Lies
By Chris Kubecka Author of The Drone Wars OSINT Field Guide to Russian Drone Footage & Verification and How to Hack a Modern Dictatorship with AI: The Digital CIA/OSS Sabotage Book & espionage target
Original on Substack
AI + Chris KubeckaFor years, Moscow has been publishing population figures that looked suspiciously… buoyant. Every demographer outside the Kremlin called them “creative.” The truth? Russia’s population curve didn’t just flatten, it cratered.
1. The Mirage Years
Official data showed only a mild decline. But cross-checking birth records, pension rolls, and regional mortality stats revealed a ghost nation: millions missing, uncounted, or statistically resurrected for propaganda purposes.
Rosstat’s spreadsheets have long been more fiction than fact, part census, part science fiction.
2. Men in Disappearing Acts
Russia’s male life expectancy has been falling off a cliff. Between conscription, HIV, tuberculosis, alcoholism, overdoses, and now war, the demographic pyramid looks more like a crumbling smokestack.
Entire age bands of men under 45 are statistically vanishing, the ones who should be working, fathering, building, or leading. Instead, they’re missing from the workforce, from homes, and increasingly from existence.
3. The Viral Collapse
Russia once boasted it had “contained” HIV. By 2025, it stopped publishing HIV data entirely. Why? Because the epidemic never stopped, it just went dark. The country lacks consistent access to proper antiretroviral medication, leaving millions unable to suppress viral loads.
Drug rehabilitation barely exists. Most “rehabs” are religious boot camps that try to beat or shame addiction out of people. Meanwhile, intravenous drug use continues to spread infections, made worse by the military’s reuse of needles in field clinics.
The result: a viral bomb detonating inside an already shrinking population.
4. The Chemical Plague
Russia’s drug crisis reads like a dystopian manual. Methadone treatment is banned. Krokodil, a homemade opioid cooked with gasoline and codeine; remains the drug of last desperation. It eats flesh from the inside out. Average life expectancy after first use: about 2.5 years.
Hospitals amputate limbs to keep users alive a little longer, then discharge them back into poverty and infection.
Layer on top an explosion of drug-resistant tuberculosis, especially in prisons and the military, and you have a medical ecosystem collapsing under its own denial. The state calls it “regional variance.” Doctors call it what it is: a death spiral.
5. The War Tax on Fertility
War took the draft-age men. Sanctions took the hope. Now, women aren’t having kids.
Russia’s fertility rate in 2025 is brushing against post-collapse Japan levels, but without the sushi, the safety net, or the economic recovery. Entire maternity wards have shut down. Rural hospitals have vanished. Every new mobilization wave widens the gender gap.
Bonus: Russia decriminalized domestic violence.
Double bonus: It’s now restricting birth control and abortion. A grim echo of Nicolae Ceaușescu’s Romania, where forced births created a generation of neglected, institutionalized children.
When the state starts treating wombs like strategic assets, it’s not about family values. It’s demographic desperation disguised as patriotism.
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6. Immigration Illusions
To keep the graphs from embarrassing the Kremlin, migrant workers from Central Asia are counted as “permanent population.” But they aren’t staying. Even Uzbekistan looks like a better deal these days.
The Kremlin’s idea of “population stability” is creative accounting, a revolving door of exploited labourers propping up statistics that even Excel can’t believe.
7. The China Problem
When your eastern provinces have more graves than graduates, you stop being a superpower and start being a resource appendix to Beijing.
Siberia’s future looks less like “Mother Russia” and more like “Northern Commodity Zone.”
China doesn’t need to invade, it just needs to wait. Empty towns and open mines make perfect satellite economies.
8. The Endgame: Statistical Necromancy
Rosstat still insists everything’s fine. But even state economists whisper that Russia’s population may have quietly dropped below 135 million — the lowest since the early 1970s.
In a country built on appearances, this is the one illusion they can’t sustain forever. You can fake elections. You can fake GDP. You can’t fake a generation that no longer exists.
9. Children as Future Soldiers
One reason orphans, IDPs, and Ukrainian children from occupied territories were taken to “re-education” camps: demographics. A vanishing youth base means indoctrination replaces birth rates. The goal is to twist hearts and minds early. Just as the Canada and the U.S. once did with Native boarding schools, or as totalitarian regimes have done for centuries. When you can’t grow your population, you manufacture it ideologically.
When your population is collapsing, indoctrination becomes policy.
10. Statistical Theatre: How Russia Inflates the Numbers
From GDP to birth rates, Moscow has perfected the art of statistical cosplay. The BBC and other analysts have shown how both Russia and China massage figures to avoid signs of contraction, counting ghost companies, recycling census data, and inflating growth projections.
Russian demographers estimate internal data inflation at 5–15% for economic indicators and up to 10% for population figures, depending on the region. It’s not just creative accounting; it’s existential necessity.
When your regime depends on the illusion of vitality, the Excel sheet becomes a battlefield.
Final Thought
The Kremlin’s greatest illusion wasn’t propaganda or fake referendums, it was pretending there’d always be another generation to inherit the empire. The numbers finally caught up with the lies, and what’s left is a ghost country. A ghost country with nukes.
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Chris Kubecka is the founder and CEO of Hypasec NL an esteemed cyberwarfare expert, advisor to numerous governments, UN groups and freelance journalist. She is the former Aramco Head of Information Protection Group and Joint Intelligence Group, former. Distinguished Chair of the Middle East Institute, veteran USAF aviator and U.S. Space Command. She specializes in critical infrastructure security and unconventional digital threats and risks. When not getting recruited by dodgy nation-states or embroiled in cyber espionage, she hacks dictatorships & Drones (affiliate link to my books) and drinks espresso.
@SecEvangelism on Instagram, X, BlueSky LinkedIn Substack
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