Russia's War of Genocidal Inclusion

Fighting Depopulation One Casualty at a Time

Mother Russia and her handmaidens, Little Miss Belarus and rebel teenage daughter Ukraine. Source: Wikimedia Commons

“Paradox was Russia’s most distinguishing feature. Constantly at war and expanding in every direction, it nevertheless considered itself permanently threatened.”
— Henry Kissinger, Diplomacy (1994), p. 140

Speaking about the war in Ukraine, my Armenian cobbler wryly observed that if there’s one thing Russia needs more of, it’s land. His own homeland, Armenia, once encompassed eastern Anatolia in today’s Turkey. Now it’s just a sliver of a state in the Caucasus, further losing the Nagorno-Karabakh enclave to Azerbaijan in 2023. By contrast, as Peter Hopkirk observes, the Russian Empire had expanded at a rate of 20,000 square miles a year for four centuries. Per Hopkirk, the British “feared that the Cossacks would only rein in their horses when India too was theirs.”¹ Despite the loss of Poland (later partially reconquered), Finland (later partially reconquered), and the Baltic states (later fully reconquered), the Soviet Union retained most of the territory of its imperial predecessor. Under Joseph Stalin, the Soviets also gained new land. For example, the Kaliningrad exclave is formerly German territory that was ethnically cleansed and repopulated with Russians after World War II.² Even with the collapse of the Soviet Union, Russia remains the largest country in the world. Why, then, Vladimir Putin’s obsession with re-expanding Russia by conquering Ukraine?

Ivan Krastev and Stephen Holmes argue that Putin’s war may be more about people than land, demography than geography. Russia’s population is rapidly aging, emigrating, and shrinking. As Krastev and Holmes note, “Putin understands that, in the world of tomorrow, Russia will be a territorial giant and population dwarf. Russia’s population will not only be much smaller than the populations of India, China, or the United States but also one-half of Ethiopia’s and one-third of Nigeria’s.”³ Compounding Putin’s fears, Russia’s Slavic core has lower birth rates than many of its ethnic minorities. While Russia is officially a multinational federation, ethnic (or, if you will, “Heritage”) Russians have pride of place as the “state-forming people.” Putin failed to reverse Russia’s declining fertility rate through pro-natalist policies, but did add over 2 million more ethnic Russians by annexing Crimea in 2014. By conquering all of Ukraine, the theory goes, Putin could gain another ~40 million. Of course, most Ukrainians are not ethnic Russians, but Putin’s denial of Ukrainian nationhood reflects his ambition to absorb them as such.

In a sense, then, Russian demographic imperialism is an alternative to mass immigration, which is how European countries (or at least their leaders) have chosen to address their own shrinking populations. Just as France and Britain draw many immigrants from their former colonies, most migrants to Russia come from formerly Soviet Central Asia. In 2024, four Tajik nationals affiliated with the Islamic State killed 149 Russians in a terror attack near Moscow. A nativist backlash against Central Asians soon followed. Both Islamist terrorism and ethnic strife are threats to the Russian state.⁴ But depopulation—the consequence of falling birth rates without immigration—carries its own risks of economic decline and foreign encroachment. In Russia’s case, geography compounds demographic concerns. Per Krastev and Holmes, Putin fears “Russia’s shrinking and aging demographic cannot adequately harness the potential of its own vast geographic expanse,” particularly as global warming increases opportunities for mineral extraction in the Arctic.

Why not, then, avoid the perils of both mass immigration and depopulation by increasing the number of “state-forming people” through the conquest and assimilation of adjacent ethnic kin? Putin’s easy annexation of Crimea likely encouraged him as to the wisdom of this approach. But as Krastev and Holmes note, “Ukraine is one of the few countries in the world whose demographic prospects are worse than Russia’s.” The Russian invasion further collapsed the Ukrainian birth rate to its lowest recorded levels, in addition to the loss of over 6 million Ukrainians to emigration and perhaps 100,000 to war. And far from reclaiming their “Little Russian” identity, most Ukrainians have rallied around the flag. One commentator noted that “Putin has proved to be the greatest contributor to Ukrainian nationalism since the 19th-century Ukrainian bard Taras Shevchenko.” Meanwhile, Russian military deaths number an estimated 250,000, while perhaps 900,000 Russians have left the country for economic or political reasons. From Putin’s Slavophile perspective, the use of ethnic minorities as cannon fodder may soften the demographic blow. Still, there are only so many Dagestanis and Buryats to toss into the meat grinder.

On the other hand, from a cold-blooded demographic perspective, the war isn’t a total wash for Putin. Perhaps over a million Ukrainians now live in Russia, either genuine refugees or victims of forced relocation. Putin has used the war to draw Belarus, the final third of the All-Russian trinity, closer to Russia. Were Russia to successfully absorb Belarus into a “Union State,” Putin could pocket another 9 million Slavs.⁵ Though Putin is unlikely to fulfill his original goal of conquering all of Ukraine, Russia may yet formalize control of the Donbas, currently home to perhaps another few million. Insofar as the goal of his war was to accumulate more State-Forming Human Capital (SFHC), Putin may yet come out ahead. But then what? In the first quarter of 2025, Russia’s birth rate plunged to a 200-year low. According to one estimate, Russia’s population could fall from 143 to 130 million by 2046—approximately the size of the Russian Empire in 1897. Adding another net 12 million aging Slavs with similarly low birth rates may delay, but won’t halt, Russia’s population decline.

Yet outside of sub-Saharan Africa, almost the entire world is facing a similar population implosion.⁶ The Russian case is extreme due to the growing mismatch between geographic size and demographic heft, but it’s not an outlier. Krastev and Holmes place Putin’s invasion in the context of Native American “mourning wars,” in which tribes “would raid each other’s communities, kidnapping women and children to compensate for widespread losses of their own people to contagious diseases and warfare.” They provocatively note that “These wars, if they were genocidal, were wars of genocidal inclusion.” Is Russia’s invasion of Ukraine just the first of many 21st-century mourning wars? The UN predicts that China’s population will fall by 54% to 639 million by 2100. But South Korea’s will fall by an even greater 58% to 22 million. Will a demographically declining China annex and Sinicize a depopulated Korean peninsula? It will almost certainly attempt to conquer Taiwan, which is already ethnically Chinese. And what about Russia’s Far East, sparsely inhabited even if Putin brings in newly Russified Slavic colonists? Perhaps Russia’s war of genocidal inclusion is just an early prelude to its own subjugation.⁷

1. Peter Hopkirk, The Great Game (2006), p. 5.

2. Other Soviet imperial acquisitions include Finnish territory conquered in 1940 and 1944; Tuva, north of Mongolia, which was annexed in 1944; and the southern half of Sakhalin and the Kuril Islands, taken from Japan in 1945. Stalin also seized Romanian lands following the 1940 Nazi–Soviet pact, though these are now part of Ukraine.

3. With a projected population of 367 million in 2100 (from 132 million today), will the Ethiopian Empire rise again?

4. Of course, if carefully exploited, they can also be opportunities. Moscow used possibly staged terror attacks as a pretext to launch the Second Chechen War in 1999.

5. There are also Russian minorities in nearby Kazakhstan, Moldova, and the Baltic states, if Putin truly decides to go for broke.

6. An exception is Israel, the only developed country with a fertility rate consistently above replacement level. According to legend, Vladimir the Great considered converting Kievan Rus to Islam, Judaism, or Christianity. He rejected Islam because his people wouldn’t accept a ban on alcohol, and Judaism because he saw the loss of Jerusalem as proof that God had abandoned the Jews. In retrospect, perhaps mass conversion to Judaism would‘ve solved Russia’s demographic woes. After all, the Jews did regain Jerusalem (and ritually drink wine).

7. In a nod to Russian history, we could call this scenario the Tartar Yoke redux; or, in tribute to Alexander Dugin, Eurasianism in reverse. Russia seized Outer Manchuria from Qing China between 1858 and 1860, providing a historical justification for Chinese irredentism.