(Bloomberg) -- President Vladimir Putin set a goal for Russians to live longer even as the country’s population is set to shrink in a deepening demographic crisis that’s been exacerbated by the Covid-19 pandemic and his war in Ukraine.

Putin ordered the government to develop policies for raising life expectancy to 81 years in Russia by 2036, up from 73.4 years last year, in a new decree on national development goals.

The decree updates a goal Putin set in 2020 for life expectancy to rise to 78 years by 2030. The 71-year-old president was inaugurated Tuesday for his fifth term to 2030 and can potentially rule to 2036.

Putin’s targets are “unrealistic without stopping the war and sharply tightening the screws on strong alcohol and cigarettes, as well as doubling health care spending,” independent demographer Alexei Raksha said on his Telegram channel. The number of births in Russia last year was the lowest this century, according to his estimates.

The goals for extending Russians’ life expectancy are in line with best-case scenarios published by the Federal Statistics Service in December. In the base case, though, Putin’s target of 78 years would be hit only in 2037 while the ambition of raising lifespans to 81 years wouldn’t even be reached in 2045. 

By comparison, life expectancy at birth in the European Union reached 80.6 years in 2022, according to Eurostat data. 

Putin has warned for years that Russia’s shrinking population threatens its political and economic future. Fertility rates in the world’s largest country by area plunged in the 1990s during the economic shock that followed the breakup of the Soviet Union.

The government has poured billions into programs aiming to boost the birth rate by offering payments to women who have more children. Still, it’s had little effect in reversing the demographic decline.

Putin’s decree appears to recognize the challenge, urging the government to raise the fertility rate to 1.6 by 2030 and 1.8 by 2036, still lower than the level needed to maintain a stable population.

Russia’s population fell by about 1.7 million people in the five years from January 2019 to January 2024, to 146 million, according to the statistics service. The total includes some 2 million people in Ukraine’s Crimea that Russia illegally annexed in 2014.

It forecast the slump will continue in the decades ahead, reaching 139 million in 2046, including an estimated 1.8 million people in Crimea.

A study by the Russian Academy of Science’s Institute for Economic Forecasting calculated the population would slide to 136 million in 2050, based on “quite optimistic” assumptions about birth and death rates.  

Putin’s February 2022 invasion of Ukraine is intensifying Russia’s demographic crunch, with hundreds of thousands of troops estimated to have been killed or wounded in the fighting. As many as a million people may also have fled abroad since the war began.

Putin’s War Escalation Is Hastening Demographic Crash for Russia

That added to pressure from the Covid-19 pandemic, with Russia suffering its deadliest year since World War II in 2021 when the population declined by 1 million people.

Russia’s economy is already starved of labor as businesses compete with the military’s demands for recruits to fight in Ukraine. That’s adding to problems linked to a greying population and migrant outflows to neighboring central Asian states.

©2024 Bloomberg L.P.