This video from at least 7 years ago lays out some of the reasons why the Russians may well have gotten rather adventurous of late: they are running out of Russians, but they’re not running out of routes to invade Russia. So rather than cultivate good relations with the surrounding nations or get on about the task of making more Russians, they seem to have gone the other route of trying to seize all the invasion routes while they still have a military with which to do it. As the last year of their little two-week “military operation” has shown, that hasn’t gone so well.
Note the “demographic pyramid” he shows here. It lays out the population of Russia by age; a growing population has a wide base of young people, but back when this video was made (circa 2015) Russias base was looking kinda weak. However, it did seem to be growing somewhat:
So how is it looking today?
Oh, dear. It looks like baby-making fell off a cliff right after this guy made his video, so instead of things maybe getting better they’ve gotten much worse.
“Population pyramids” are interesting things to consider. Nations like this with shrinking young uns are in serious trouble; the pyramid for South Korea looks especially dire:
China’s not looking so good:
Nor is Japan:
Iceland, in contrast, looks kinda ok:
but if you really want to see where the population of the future is coming from, you need pyramids that look like this:
Or this:
The nations with wide bases will have greatly increased populations, with greatly increased pressures for those populations to leave and colonize low-population regions. The dying nations will, like Russia, likely try to defend themselves with constantly diminishing human resources, or they will, like much of Europe is currently doing, simply allow themselves to be colonized and replaced, culturally, religiously, ethnically.
Gonna be an interesting century.
5 responses to ““The Russian Grab””
Interesting, and perhaps a factor, but history has no end of reasons that push the Russians in the same direction without the addition of long-range demographics. Geography isn’t kind to European Russia (neither is anything else, but I digress)
They have to have defense in depth, or they get Tartars and Frenchmen and Germans, OH MY! That’s what’s driving them. Good old fear. They might be worried about the demographics, but that’s a tomorrow problem. NATO encroachment is a today problem.
” NATO encroachment is a today problem” Except… no. Nobody from Europe was going to invade Russia. Nobody from Europe *wanted* to invade Russia. There’d be nothing, absolutely nothing, to gain in doing so. Russia has nothing that the West wants badly enough to bother walking in and taking if the entire Russian military was passed out drunk. The only thing western Russia might have is gas, and Europe has been trying to wean itself off fossil fuels in favor of sunshine and light breezes. And the United States sure as shit ain’t gonna sail across the Atlantic to invade Russia Because Reasons.
Now… China? China might well be looking rather intently at Siberia. Russia would have done well to consider that issue. But they didn’t. Instead, they shifted things westwards then fed it into a meat grinder. If China decided to invade Siberia, basically the only thing the Russians could do is threaten nukes… and after seeing the dismal state of Russian military equipment and maintenance and logistics, the Chinese just might gamble that Russian ICBMS and warheads are largely duds. And seeing how the ChiComs were willing to lose millions to their little bat-flu, losing a few cities to Russian nukes might have been worth little more than a shrug.
Here’s the thing about other people, they don’t see it the same way you do. We’ve been over this NATO thing before, so I’ll spare everyone the rehash.
My point here is that this is actually how they see the issue. This has been consistent over time, and they haven’t been shy screeching about it. Even before the USSR broke up, they were flopping about over the breakup of the Warsaw Pact, and we were very reassuring that this would never happen.
This whole thing could have been prevented in any number of ways. The way that we chose however was predictably going to force the Russian to shit or get off the pot.
As for China I largely agree, I think that with Russia increasingly being a junior partner they will settle for paying for Siberian resources, at least for a couple more decades. The danger here is that they will move to preserve Russia in its present form at least until they pick it clean.
It’s interesting how some years see a big drop outside the trend. China’s in 1960-61 I’d guess would be to do with the great leap forward. I wonder what happened in Japan around 1965 that caused such a big drop in birthrates?
Taran—aerial ramming—was used in WW II