Description
How does Russia instrumentalise demographic engineering to consolidate territorial control in occupied regions of Ukraine? Addressing the urgent demographic crisis by stimulating population growth has been a feature of each iteration of Russian National Security Strategy under Putin. However, Russia’s attempts to secure success on the battlefield have led to increasing policy incoherence between demographic and national security policies. This paper analyses Russia’s security strategies, family policy, and settlement incentives to assess how demographic policy is weaponised to achieve security objectives and expand Russian-citizen settlement in occupied Ukrainian territories (including Crimea, Donetsk, Luhansk, Zaporizhzhia, and Kherson). Drawing on existing literature which frames Russia’s war in Ukraine as an imperial conquest, this paper will also evaluate the settler-colonial logics underpinning these wartime policy developments. The corpus includes official government documents such as Russian national security strategies (2009, 2015, 2021), demographic and family policy, and presidential/governmental decrees, as well as NGO/IO reporting on forced deportations and population transfers. While existing scholarship treats Russian pronatalism and territorial expansion as separate policy domains, this paper makes a unique contribution to the literature by demonstrating that demographic policy has become a weapon of war and a tool of military consolidation.
