Rosstats Data Blackout: A Blend of Demographic Crisis and War-Related Concealment

Russia’s state statistics agency, Rosstat, has ceased to publish monthly statistics on births and deaths, a decision made in the context of a worsening demographic crisis and ongoing military casualties from the conflict in Ukraine.

For the first time, Rosstat presented its monthly socio-economic report last week without any data on births, deaths, migration, or the overall population of the country.

Earlier this year, the agency had already stopped providing regional statistics on births and deaths.

“Since March 2025, there has been almost no demographic data accessible to the public in Russia,” noted demographer Alexei Raksha at that time. “The complete withholding of regional demographic data is clearly indicative of a failed demographic strategy at the local level.”

The U.S.-based Institute for the Study of War (ISW) connected the recent data blackout with the Kremlin’s attempts to “conceal the substantial personnel losses of the Russian military.”

Raksha backed this assertion with internal statistics from an unnamed region, suggesting that life expectancy for men had decreased from 66 years in 2024 to 61 years by mid-2025, while life expectancy for women remained at 75.

Since the onset of its extensive invasion of Ukraine in 2022, Russia has progressively limited access to demographic data that analysts have relied upon to deduce wartime fatalities, including deaths classified by age, region, and cause.

Rosstat’s data blackout in May followed an alarming report of just 90,500 births in February—the lowest monthly total seen in over two centuries. Raksha anticipates that the first quarter of 2025 likely recorded the least number of births since the early 1800s.

On Saturday, federal representative Nina Ostanina shared an appeal from a coalition of economists, urging the government to clarify the absence of data and asking Rosstat to resume the publication of national birth and death statistics.