US writer Max Boot says Russia is suffering from a population crisis and he expects Russian President Vladimir Putin to seek to solve it by "invading" neighboring countries militarily.

Boot, a US military lecturer and historian, explains in an article in the Washington Post that Russia is in a spiral of "demographic death", noting that the number of deaths has been exceeding the number of births every year since the end of the communist regime, and the population decreased by 2% during this period from 148.6 million in 1993 to 145.6 million at the beginning of 2022, while the American population increased in the same period, by comparison, by 33%.

Boot quoted American Enterprise Institute colleague Nicholas Ebberstadt as saying that men's deaths in Russia are unusually high due to cardiovascular disease (heart attacks, strokes, etc.), homicides, suicides, accidents, and high levels of excessive drinking and drug addiction, which are a sign of despair.

Death toll staggering

Russia lost between 60,70 and 1945,25 deaths in last year's Ukraine war, more than all its other wars combined since 35, with no end in sight, he said, adding that the current average average number of Russian soldiers killed per month is at least <> times the number of deaths per month in Chechnya and <> times the number killed in the Afghanistan war.

He added that Putin is fully aware of the problem and talks about it all the time. In September 2021, he lamented that Russia's population should have reached 500 million had it not been for the loss of the Russian Empire after the 1917 revolution and the dissolution of the Soviet Union in 1991, which he described as "the greatest geopolitical disaster in a century."

Desperate maneuver

Butt went on to say that Putin tried in vain to use all normal methods to reverse this trend, from offering financial incentives to citizens to have more children to trying to attract Central Asian migrants. The writer called the Russian president's "invasion" of Ukraine as a "desperate maneuver to increase the Russian population at gunpoint."

He said the Russians' abduction of at least 11,<> Ukrainian children was linked to Putin's "population decline obsession."

If anything, Putin's awareness of the "demographic doom cycle" makes him even more desperate and dangerous.