In Russia, he has about the family.
Just look at the Asachyovs. Vera and her husband Timofey have eight children – from 18-year-old Sofiya to 18-month-old Marusya – and they’ve just been crowned Moscow Family of the Year.
“It’s an honor and joy,” Vera Asachyova told Sky News when asked how he felt winning.
“It is a source of pride for our family, just for my husband and me, but also for the young people and their grandmothers and grandfathers. “
And that’s not its only price.
Having had so many children, they were also venerated with the prestigious Order of the Glory of the Fathers, which Vera proudly wears pinned to her chest.
The family’s beaming faces are even on the city’s billboards.
They present themselves as a circle of family members who do their patriotic duty.
That’s because Russia’s birth rate is at a quarter-of-a-century low and the state wants others to follow the Asachyovs’ lead.
The official data indicate that in Russia 599,600 young people were born in the first part of 2024, 16,000 less than in the same period of 2023 and the lowest point since 1999.
The Kremlin has called the “catastrophic” figure and is desperate.
The last attempt is the prohibition of “propaganda without children”, which unanimously continued through the Russian Parliament’s decrease chamber last month.
Its objective is to promote the life of children, and who has taken the propagation can now be sentenced to a fine.
But does this propaganda exist? Even if this is the case, are there really more pressing reasons why a woman might not need to have children?
For example, the prices involved, or perhaps because your spouse went to fight in Ukraine, or worse, died there.
I put that to Tatiana Butskaya, an MP for Russia’s ruling party, United Russia, who sits on the parliamentary committee for Family Protection.
“It is an ideology life on earth,” he replied, referring to the so -called propaganda.
“If [our parents] had adhered to this ideology, none of us would be here at this press convention today. Maybe there would have been other people here and even robots. “
Vladimir Putin has already encouraged women to have at least three children to secure Russia’s future.
In one line, Ms. Butskaya criticized families with only one child, calling them “strangers. “
“If this family has lived together for a long time, you think, ‘Well, maybe they have illnesses? Maybe something is wrong in the family’. Right?
“They have lived in combination for 30 years and have given birth to a child. Something is wrong. “
According to the authorities, propaganda in favor of young people is omnipresent: in films, on the Internet and in the media. But that is what you feel walking through Moscow.
Pretty much everywhere you look there are huge billboards promoting family and motherhood. The message on one reads “we have room to grow” in Russian.
Russia insists that women still have the right not to have children, but feminist activists like Zalina Marshenkulova say that is no longer true.
The prominent blogger left Russia some time after the full-scale invasion of Ukraine and accused in absentia of “justifying terrorism” through a Russian court earlier this year.
“It’s reproductive violence,” he told Sky News, referring to the prohibition of propaganda without children. This is a repressive law that they needed to turn all women into reproductive mechanisms into slaves.
“If you’re smart, if you love freedom, if you respect yourself, you can’t live in Russia. That’s what they try to say to us by this stupid law.”
Lea de Sky News: Putin opens to peace conversations in Slovakia’nato Santa ‘in Obvia propaganda
A low birth rate isn’t Russia’s only demographic problem, of course. It also has a rising mortality rate, made worse by the war in Ukraine.
Stopping the war would help boost the population. But that’s not discussed.
Apparently, propaganda without young people is the biggest problem.