An article in The Economist´s edition of April 30 informs that “Mr. Putin has been splashing out cash to encourage women to have babies“. But since that has been proved incapable of increasing the number of Russian children to compensate for the high mortality rate (increased by Covid-19 at a rate of 1,000 a day) and since an article published in the Financial Times three days ago states that the Ukraine war threatens to deepen Russia’s demographic crisis, so it’s just a question of how long will it take before the Russian army starts raping Russian women on a massive scale in order to increase the number of Russian children?
Be there as it may, it is perfectly clear that even this brutal tactic will not prevent an increase in the number of Russians abandoning a country that is heading towards world irrelevance. The same irrelevance that is now the watermark of its scientific production, exponentiated due to the international boycott that has already caused Russia’s scientific production to fall by more than 30%.
Yuval Noah Harari wrote that Russia is nothing more than “a gas station with nukes“. No wonder then that in the same article mentioned at the beginning of this post one can also read the following words: “Thousands of well-educated Russians have left a country which they now believe offers them no future”
Pacheco-Torgal 