Life Expectancy in Russia Continues to Fall – Despite Putin’s May Decree

Shortly after his May 7 inauguration as President of Russia for the fifth time, Vladimir Putin issued a decree that outlined his set of national goals for 2030 and 2036.  The declarations covered areas including expanding the economy, improving living conditions, digital transformation, increasing the birth rate, instilling “traditional values,” improving the environment and increasing life expectancy.

In the decree, Putin said one of his goals was: “Increasing life expectancy to 78 years by 2030 and to 81 years by 2036, including rapid growth in healthy life expectancy.”

Figures issued by the federal state statistics service Rosstat this week showed that over a 12-month period, July 2023 - June 2024, average life expectancy had fallen and now stood at 73.24 years, which is the same as it was in 2017.

In 2018, Putin declared that “health expectancy,” which is the number of years an individual can expect to live without significant disease or injury was a better measure of improvement in the nation’s quality of life than straight “life expectancy.”

According to the World Health Organization, using the Kremlin’s own figures, Russia was also failing in this metric. In 2019 health expectancy was 64.2 years with a declared goal of increasing it to 67 years by 2024. Figures released by Rosstat showed there had actually been a decline to an average of just 61.37 years in 2023.

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The Russian demographic analyst Alexey Raksha commenting on the data puts the cause of the fall to a number of factors including skyrocketing numbers of traffic accidents, rampant alcohol abuse, extreme summer and winter weather combined with shortages in energy supplies and, of course, Putin’s ill-fated war in Ukraine.

Raksha said, “There can be no talk of any 78 years by 2030 in such a situation. Moreover, even Rosstat’s more cautious forecasts will clearly not be fulfilled.”

The UN Department of Economic and Social Affairs suggests that is exacerbated by a drop in Russia’s birth rate – another of Putin’s May targets that is failing. The agency assessed in 2022 that Russia’s population is decreasing by more than 300,000 a year so that by 2050 the population will decrease to 133 million compared with 130 million in 1970 and 129 million in 1897.

The tradition of Putin setting national goals by issuing decrees in May after each election began in 2012. These have seen him adding to the country’s wish list after successive inaugurations and against a background of the fact that not even one has yet been successfully realized, despite the best efforts of his ministers and his state media to spin it otherwise.