Imagine if the US released a video encouraging foreigners to move here by showing examples of what we considered to be our greatest strengths. Now imagine if those examples of our greatest strengths included an image of Geronimo (the Apache leader who fought against American expansion before eventually being tricked into surrendering and spending the rest of his life imprisoned miles from his homeland by an army that didn't honor its promises in the surrender agreement), with a voiceover calling him an "American Hero." Imagine also, if we showed several Cuban and Filipino performers with a voiceover calling them "world class entertainers," neglecting to mention that the countries they hail from aren't part of America, and only were for a very short stint of time. Let us also imagine if this video displayed a shot of a Civil War cemetery (where hundreds of thousands of Americans died in a war against other Americans) with a voiceover describing "unity," and just for good measure, a few shots of Vietnam protests with a voiceover describing "harmonious living."
Is it possible, dear reader, to imagine anything more ridiculous than such a video? Well, it isn't easy, but...
Russian Government: "Her-r-re! Hold my vodka and vatch THIS!"

First, Does Everyone Remember THAT Video?

"[If] you've ever wondered how the younger generation got into the habit of using 'cringe' as an adjective instead of a verb, watch this video once and you will understand."

Back in the Summer of 2022, Russia released a "time to move to Russia" video. And if you've ever wondered how the younger generation got into the habit of using "cringe" as an adjective instead of a verb, watch this video once and you will understand.
While most of the rebuttal that this video needs has already been given (so if you've already seen it and read an analysis of it, then go ahead and skip to the next heading), its existence is relevant to my point. The first section of this article will revisit this video and remind readers just how absurd it was. The second will go on to show that this video was merely one of many such pitiful "come to Russia" recruiting videos by the Kremlin, and the third will shine some light on just WHY Russia is so desperate to entice people from countries they are threatening to go to nuclear war against (Cole), to move to Russia.
So without further ado, let's take a few minutes to pick apart this creepily delusional example of what Artem Dikarev would call "R-r-r-r-r-r-r-r-r-r-ridikkulus, R-r-r-r-r-r-r-r-russian, Pr-r-r-r-r-r-r-r-r-ropaganda!"

"This is Russia." Umm... no. It's Ukraine. Meanwhile, that hammer and sickle, the symbol of an ideology that killed more people in one century than any four other ideological wars in all of Human history combined, is probably not what you want attached to the words "this is Russia," especially since your video seems aimed primarily at the Right (pro-tip: the guys you're trying to recruit, hate Communism).

Uh, yeah... speaking of the guys you're trying to recruit... does Russia feel like they have a shortage of pedophiles or something? Is that who this is aimed at?

Yes, Sonya is breathtaking, but she's not Russian. Again, we're showing images of Ukrainian splendor and claiming "you should move to Russia because this is Russia."

At 0:09, the video proves that the Russians who made it actually believe their own propaganda, which is hilarious considering Europe had one of the warmest winters ever the following year (Abnett (1)), and Europe, which Putin thought would run out of gas, has more in storage than it did at the start of the winter (Abnett (2)). Nobody froze due to not being able to obtain gas, and nobody is going to this winter either. Or next. Or the one after...

So, we're still trying to entice Western Conservatives, whose entire worldview is wrapped up in a loathing of all things Socialist, to come to Russia, by showing how proud we are of Communism. Do I understand this correctly?

At 0:12, the trend of "let me beg you to move to Russia by showing you how awesome Ukraine is," continues unabated as the video shows us a Ukrainian author as an example of "Russia's" literature. Considering that Russian President Vladimir Voldemortovich Putana has spent years claiming Ukraine doesn't rightfully exist and is actually only part of Russia (using phrasology that he seems to have learned by watching his master, Xi Jinping, discuss Tibet), this is probably intentional. I would not be surprised if the Russians who made this video actually thought they were being subtle and thought that these were some sort of unnoticed "subliminal messages" that the "Stoopid Vester-r-r-rnur-r-rs" wouldn't pick up on.

Of course, this might simply be sloppy editing. Perhaps they didn't mean to show copied-and-pasted European architecture. Perhaps they should have used a shot of St. Basil's, or some of Russia's famous onion-domed cathedrals. Then they would be showing copied Turkish architecture instead. Much more unique. What makes it even funnier is that later on at 0:26, the video shows a shot of a building in Russia that was specifically designed as a carbon copy of the Palace of Culture in Warsaw, Poland. I don't think "unique" means what this film's designers believe it means.

It goes on. At 0:24 and 0:25, the video refers to "ballet," which the film-makers seem to think doesn't exist outside of Russia, while the example they show is a lackluster leap which, according to a ballerina and ex-ballerina who I showed the video to, would not impress an eight-year-old at a cheap junior ballet academy. From 0:30 onward, the film kind of tips its hand at being aimed at disaffected Conservatives by listing "Traditional values... Christianity... no cancel culture" in that order (though, again, someone probably ought to let them know that if they're aiming this video at the Right, they might want to lay off the 'Da, vee ar-r-r-r-re pr-r-r-roud of R-r-r-r-russian Kommunism, Komr-r-r-rade" imagery). One has to wonder what "traditions" their values stem from, in light of the children the video displayed as an example of "beautiful women" in point 2 and as for "Christianity," hold that thought for a moment. We'll get back to it.
Anyway...
The assertion that Russia has "no cancel culture" is probably the most hilarious point in the video. Russia, who claims to have "no cancel culture," has been trying to cancel Ukraine's culture - beginning with its language - for centuries (Shulzhenko). In fact, Russia is one of only two major powers in modern history (the other is China, who has spent decades denying the existence of the Nation of Tibet, as mentioned above) to ever try and deny the existence of an entire nation.
The latest round of the "cancel culture" Russia claims not to have, began in 2011, when they first ordered the closure of all Ukrainian cultural institutions in Russia (Goble).
It continued with a shockingly violent police raid on Moscow's Ukrainian language library in 2015, alleging that essentially anything that asserted the existence of Ukrainian as a separate language from Russia, or of Ukraine as a state, was "Anti-Russian propaganda (Euronews)." They went on in 2017 to prosecute the librarian on the charge that allowing Russians to know a Ukrainian language exists was some form of separatist extremism (Raczkiewycz), and in 2018 proceeded close down this library and destroy its contents (Ukrainski Pravda).
Because nothing says "no cancel culture" like a good old-fashioned, Nazi-style book-burning, right?
Oh, I almost forgot. They went on to ban the Ukrainian language, in Ukrainian schools, full of ethnic Ukrainians, on occupied Ukrainian soil in the Donbas region (RFE/RL Staff), which makes their nonsensical allegations of "OoKwAiN iZ wEpWeSiNg Da RaShAn LaNgWiJ iN dA dOnBaS!!!" that much more ironic, but never mind.

Anyway, from 0:50 - 0:53, the video finally ends with this admonition.

There has been some debate over whether this was a lame attempt at an outdated Game of Thrones reference, or another example of Russia believing their own propaganda about "the West will all freeze without Russia's gas." Frankly, given the adolescent level of ham-fisted thought displayed throughout the rest of the video, I'm guessing it was an attempt to try and tie in the latter with a pop-culture reference by phrasing it as the former. And the video-maker probably thought they were quite clever to do so as well.

And no. Before you suggest it, this wasn't a satire by the Ukrainians. The fact-checker site Polygraph, which ruled the video's contents as "false" (how does one say 'No shit, Sherlock' in Russian, anyway?) traced it to a staunchly and unabashedly pro-Russia Youtube channel and corresponding Telegram channel called 'Signal,' though it has since been taken down from both channels, likely due to the humiliating laughter that greeted it in virtually every appearance.

Meanwhile, Russian-State-backed Twitter pages in India spread this video.
https://twitter.com/ruscult_chennai/status/1553648350188015616?s=20&t=AaeKOojz23FRbWbtOo8yAA
So did Russia's own embassy in Spain.

https://twitter.com/EmbajadaRusaES/status/1552886838926479360
This has been shared by too many official Russian state pages to try and say it is a foreign satire. Russia actually trolled themselves this badly. The sharing of the "time to move to Russia" video by Russia's embassy in Spain is especially ironic considering that Spain is a member of the EU, which is on the Russian State Duma's official list of "unfriendly countries (Tass Staff)." Yet clearly, they are eager to recruit immigrants (with the pedophilic preferences mentioned above in point #2, it seems) from these "unfriendly countries" to move to Russia.

EVERYONE On the Internet Wants YOU to Move to Russia! NOW!

"At this point, it must be asked: If Russia considers these countries "unfriendly," why is Russia so desperate to get these countries' people to move to Russia?"

So, the video above shows all the signs of having been made by a cheap ChatGPT knockoff whose source language consisted entirely of geopolitka.ru articles and tweets by Dmitry Medvedyev, but it isn't by any means the only example. Russian State Media was a bit less subtle than this, when ne of the recurring "experts" on a Russian State-owned talk show said that after America's "inevitable split," American Christians will have no choice but to move to Russia to live under "Biblical Law."
https://twitter.com/Gerashchenko_en/status/1652755909947318272
So, since we're on the subject of the so-called "Biblical Law" that is allegedly in place in nominally "Christian" Russia (and I did say above that I'd get back to this), I'd like a Russian Orthodox Priest to cite for me which Bible verse is quoted (and which of Christ's precepts is invoked) by a priest pronouncing a blessing over a thermonuclear warhead aimed at the civilian population (Falsani, Bender) of a nation that has never engaged in a single act of aggression in its entire history. In fact, while we're on this subject...

But again, I digress. Anyway, it isn't just a few ignorant comments on Russian State Media and a facepalm-inducingly-bad propaganda video with voiceovers by a cut-rate over-actor. This theme of "hey westerners, I know we've been threatening to nuke your countries and all but I really want you to move to Russia" is something the Russian State has been pushing lately.
And they've been pushing it hard.
In the past few years, the internet has gotten flooded with "you should move to Russia" videos, and while I can't be sure of this (there have been too many of them for me to make a chart showing the frequency of them over time), these videos appear to have gotten more common since the sanctions hit Russia after the 2022 invasion of Ukraine. On Youtube, most of these videos are made by expat influencers with Youtube channels whose production budget went conspicuously upward when they arrived in Russia and started getting paid by the Russian State. Here are a few examples.

Expat American is a channel that opened 11 months ago. His channel came into existence with 15K subscribers, which already clues you in that its growth was not organic. Of course, to boost him right off the bat, his state partners arranged for their other sponsored Youtube channels to line up one after another and interview their new fellow propagandist. His channel consists entirely of "life in Russia is better than life in America" videos, including one where he shows off a "normal" Russian apartment, that just happens to be in one of Moscow's richest districts, and tries to pretend everyone who moves to Russia will live likewise. The funny thing is he'd have gotten away with the deception if he hadn't tried to claim it was his apartment, and then showed his own (far shabbier) apartment in numerous other videos. I remind the reader that the phrase "Potemkin Village" originated in Russia.

Tall Travels is an older channel, but looking through his video history, one notices that the videography and camera quality increased dramatically after his first month in Russia, another telltale sign of sudden sponsorship. From that point forward, not only does his content closely mirror that of Expat American (listed above), tackling the same topics at roughly the same times with the same talking points (vacillating between "sanctions are evil an oppressive" to "sanctions aren't working" to "you should move to Russia like me" at all the same times), but the two channels use nearly identical graphics and even have creepily similar selections of buzzwords.

Sam's Russian adventures is a little more low-brow, and it's also the only channel on this list that seems to be aimed at the UK rather than the US. The channel owner prefers to focus his videos on "you should come to Russia because (insert stereotype here about hot, easy, visa-hunting Russian women who will throw themselves at every foreigner they meet). And while this is not exactly a new wrinkle in Russia's propaganda (at this point I'd imagine they have Red-Light-District-Style "Girls! Girls! Girls!" neon signs at the Immigration line at every international airport), he never seems to stop and ask "if Russia is so wonderful, why are all these women so eager to get out of it?" He also spends an inordinate amount of time casually slipping "I'm not a government propagandist or anything" into his conversations. Methinks the lad doth protest too much.
Anyway, like the channels above, around a year ago his topic switched from "here are the pros and cons of living in Russia" to "here is why everyone watching my channel should move to Russia right now!"

Rachel Blevins is a little more honest than most of these Youtube channels. By referring to herself as a "journalist" rather than a "blogger," she admits that she's doing this for money. As such, her content follows the usual Kremlin lines: insisting that Ukraine's continued stand against Russia's invasion and illegal annexation is only because the Evil US forces them to stand instead of kneeling before Russia the way every Russian thinks Ukraine wants to do, insisting Ukraine's refusal to roll over and let Russia take whatever they want is somehow "warmongering" and that the US is behind it, insisting that Ukraine is some form of "weapon" against Russia, insisting that the average Ukrainian wants to be part of Russia"...
...nothing new. It's the same bevy of garbage that every Russian channel on Earth has been peddling from the beginning, every one of which is debunked by a two minute conversation with quite literally any Ukrainian citizen. What is new is that around seven months ago, her focus shifted from "let me repeat the same trite and outdated conspiracy theorist bullshit you've heard from the Kremlin for years but now let's hear it from a walking, talking, hyper-sexualized pair of boobs in a tight-fitting, low-cut top because the guys who sign my paycheck think that will appeal more to their mostly-Western-Conservative-male target audience," to "let me tell you all the reasons you'll be happier living in Russia than in America."

Duncanralf is an older channel, having debuted in 2019, but essentially, the entire channel is "you should move to Russia because (insert reason here)." Basically his videos follow a pattern of two videos about women to one video about booze/scenery/whatever. And of course, the production budget is WAY above what a social media influencer with only 15K subscribers could expect to have without some form of sponsorship. And just as unsurprisingly, he uses the same graphics and the same buzzwords as "Expat American" and "Tall Travels."

Ricardo J Posada has been on Youtube since 2011, but didn't produce his first video until 2021, around the same time Expat American debuted his channel. Posada advertises himself as a "travel blogger" and his "about" page states that his page will be about his travels between Mexico, the US, and Russia. However, with the exception of one video about Mexico, and one video wherein he claims to be on his way to the US, his content is all dedicated to Russia. It contains the same formulaic "you should move to Russia because..." messages as most of the others listed here, with the same fonts and graphics, and the same suspiciously high production budget for a low-grade social media influencer.

At this point, a fairly obvious pattern emerges: an interconnected series of "you should drop everything and move to Russia now" channels, all filmed on a budget that buggers any belief about them being filmed independently, all painting a far rosier picture of Russia than the channels which look to be made by private individuals without sponsors, all using the same standard-issue set of graphics (which of course absolutely could not have come from their shared sponsor, right?), and all of them, like the video discussed in the first section, are aimed at recruiting people from countries Russia considers "unfriendly" to move to Russia. At this point, it must be asked: If Russia considers these countries "unfriendly," why is Russia so desperate to get these countries' people to move to Russia?"
The answer, weirdly enough, is "for the same reason that they invaded Ukraine."

Russia is Dying

"Russia's consolation prize has been the (illegal) annexation of four oblasts of Ukraine, which they hope they can hold onto."

"From a humanitarian point of view and from the perspective of strengthening our statehood, and from the economic point of view, the demographic problem is one of the most important."
-Vladimir Putin, November 2021 (three months before invading Ukraine), press conference quoted later by Financial Times

The long and the short is that when the USSR fell, an entire generation of Russians said "I'd rather raise my children in the West than in a collapsed ruin of a federation." In the decade between 1990 and 2000, Russia's birth rate averaged 10.9 per 1,000, which doesn't come close to being enough to maintain a static population. This practically non-existent generation started hitting adulthood in the early 2010's, and Russia's response was to send them off to Syria, and Ukraine's Donbas, to die in battle before having children, exacerbating the crisis and setting the stage for its repeat.
Russia's population decline, and the resulting inability to maintain Great Power status, isn't something that snuck up on Russia. Putin has known about it (and frantically sought to fix it) for years. The earliest record I've found of him publicly mentioning Russia's need for population growth was in 2006, when he referred to a declining population as "Russia's most acute problem." At that time, according to one US newspaper, between emigration and natural decline Russia's population was declining at a staggering 700,000 per year (Ingraham)! He got a little more vehement later on in 2012 (1), by which point Russia's population had declined from 148.7 million to 141.9 million (a decline of 4.5%) in the span of just 20 years. That was when Putin, in a speech that eerily foreshadowed the refrains that later became the go-to lines of Xi Jinping (anti-corruption, don't accept money from foreigners, and some nebulously defined references to "Western meddling"), listed population growth right alongside "Russian values" and the oh-so-loaded term "patriotic education" as Russia's top priorities for the future (Anischuk & Gutterman). “If the nation is not capable of preserving itself and reproducing, if it loses it vital bearings and ideals, then it doesn’t need foreign enemies - it will fall apart on its own,” Putin said.
Things got worse.
In 2017, despite frantic attempts to increase Russia's birth rate, it reported a year-on-year drop of 10.6 percent, reaching its lowest level in 10 years (Kormilitsyna). Mikhail Khodorovsky, founder of the Westward-leaning "Open Russia Movement," retweeted this news with a damning indictment about the reason WHY so few Russians were choosing to have children.
https://twitter.com/mich261213/status/958017635656052739
"I think there are many reasons, but the lack of hope for the future is not the least of them."
By 2020, the Russian government was doing basically everything it could do, short of herding couples into bedrooms at gunpoint and saying "get busy," to encourage childbirth. In addition to the previous year's "fertility tax credit," which is exactly what it sounds like, Putin announced a series of further measures with the openly stated goal of increasing Russia's birth rate from 1.5 per woman to 1.7 in just four years (BBC Staff). This simple imperative of "get more people in Russia" has become so central to Russia's geopolitical imperatives that some have theorized that even Russia's hardline anti-LBGT stance has less to do with the empty lip-service they pay to "Christian values" and more to do with a simple biological factor: same-sex couples can't produce offspring (Moscow Times Staff).
Add in the number of Russians who died from the Covid-19 outbreak, a number ranging from 400,023 to 807,084 depending on what source one uses, and the year between October 2020 and September 2021 saw Russia's population decline by almost a million (Chingaev). That's almost a full percentage point in a single year! The prognosis for Russia's population by this point looked frighteningly bleak.
By 2022, when the prospect of a Russo-Ukrainian war was at the forefront of everyone's minds, many voices in the West thought, not without logical reasoning, "Russia's population is declining too fast for them to risk a war (Peabody)." Russia, however, was looking at the same information and came to the conclusion of "Russia's population is declining too fast for us not to go to war (Cabot)."
Russia's invasion of Ukraine was for one purpose: to make Ukraine part of Russia. Underneath all the verbal gymnastics, Vladimir Putin has openly admitted that (Dickinson). But the goal that he didn't mention in this awkward admission is that he wasn't just after Ukraine's land. He was after its population. Ukraine had just over 43 million people at the end of 2021, almost a third of the entire population of Russia. And according to Boris Nadezhdin (an opposition member of Russia's State Duma), Vladimir Putin openly expected Russians to be welcomed in Ukraine with open arms (Phillips). One has to wonder what sort of doublethink is necessary to think Ukrainians would welcome a nation whose racist disdain for Ukrainians runs through everything from their literature to their present-day talk-shows, which openly refer to Ukrainians as "animals," (Coynash), led by a government that openly and casually calls for their extermination (Sergeytsev), but we're talking about a nation that sends Neo-Nazis on a mission do "De-Nazify" a nation with a Jewish president while blaming their aggression on an alliance that hasn't expanded toward them in 19 years and of which Ukraine isn't even a member, so... (shrug)
Anyway, given that Russia's method of war for centuries has been for their soldiers to spend a few days celebrating their "victory" by raping every woman in the newly conquered territories and their war in Ukraine has clearly been no exception,(UNSC), it would have been a boost in the birth rate of Putin's newly-reconstituted empire.
Unfortunately for Russians, reality kicked in and Ukraine handed Russia another population reduction, in the form of 276,270 young Russian men (and counting) dead on Ukrainian soil, along with another 600,000 to 1,000,000 fleeing the country due to the draft (Kiseleva & Safronova). Between Covid, the war, and draft-dodgers, and Russia's already high death rate, this leads to an estimated excess population loss of 2 million in the past 4 years, not even counting Russia's natural death rate (and let us bear in mind that in between heart disease, alcoholism, and deplorable safety standards in the Heavy Industrial sector, Russia's average life expectancy for men was less than 65 even before these extenuating few years).
Russia's consolation prize has been the (illegal) annexation of four oblasts of Ukraine, which they hope they can hold onto. Exact figures of the population aren't readily available, considering that most of those who could evacuate from these oblasts did so, but as of 2021, the combined population of Lugansk, Donetsk, Zaporizhzhia and Kherson Oblasts was 9,470,844. If half of that number stayed, and half of that half survived, then the remaining population is just barely enough to replace the number of people Russia has lost in the past four years. Since Russia is not confident that they can hold onto these newly conquered territories, they've begun the process of forcibly relocating members of the conquered population to Russia, but as Russia's transportation network is currently busy moving troops and hardware into Ukraine, moving abducted Ukrainians out of Ukraine and into Russia has not been high on their priority list. The best available figures say that Russia has managed to forcibly deport just under 1 million Ukrainians to Russia (Yayboke, Strouboulis & Edwards): not enough to even slow down the demographic decline outlined above, especially considering most of them are beyond childbearing age.

All-in-all, the war that Vladimir Putin hoped would solve Russia's population decline problem by bringing 40 million happy, eager new Russian subjects into his thriving, prosperous empire (the sarcasm should be evident) backfired by exacerbating not only the speed of Russia's population decline, to the tune of 311,000 in the first four months of 2022 (Harvey) which doesn't even include war casualties, but also the skewed gender ratio: almost all of those who have died in combat or fled, have been men. Add to this the number of foreign expats (not included in Russia's population statistics since they do not live there permanently) who have fled Russia since the start of the war (Woo & Grove), most of whom brought vital skills that were left wide open by the demographic crisis, and it becomes clear that Vladimir Putin's attempt to solve Russia's population crisis is turning it into a barely inhabited wasteland.

(1) Interestingly enough, the date of the Reuters article was 12-12-12, 10 days before the day when the world was supposed to end according to some Mayan prophecy or something or other that we've all forgotten about by this point.

So, Here We Are

"[F]or Russia to have any hope of reversing their population decline, they're going to need to add about 6 million people of childbearing age within the next ten years, and there's really no way in Hell they're going to get that from "move to Russia" videos on the internet."

"So let's see. Uh... Encouraging couples to have more children didn't work. Conquering the neighboring state didn't work. Kidnapping their population didn't work. Well, I dunno, Vladimir. I mean, uh... maybe we oughta just invite a bunch o' Westerners to move here! I mean, Russia's a great place to live, right? ...Right?"
As I said in the beginning of the article, this is what Russia has to resort to now: posting videos on social media, begging people from the countries that their entire propaganda apparatus is built on demonizing, to emigrate to Russia. And to avoid having a surplus of unmarried women, Russia has decided to appeal to a time-honored Western stereotype of Russia as a real world version of ZZ Top's "Planet of Women," even going so far as to offer tax breaks and housing subsidies to any foreign man who will marry a Russian wife.

...Yyyyyyeah. Um... what does it say about the disposition of Russian women, when even though they look like models, the Russian government still has to pay foreign men to marry them?

But hey, with such a surplus of women, a need for emigration to settle their land, and such a desperate imperative to raise their birth rate, there seems to be an obvious solution. Russia was boasting earlier about following "Biblical Law," right? Maybe after they're beaten, some of us Western men should mercifully take the defeated Russian government up on that invitation and move there for a little demonstration of Isaiah 4:1 (look it up).
Or, alternatively, perhaps Russia could discuss the problem with their Masters neighbors to the south; a nation with a surplus of men, a problem with overcrowding, and an openly professed hunger for Russian land. Of course, they're not the "move in and assimilate" type. They're more like the "move in, subjugate the locals and force them to adapt" type.
Just ask a Tibetan.

Joking aside, for Russia to have any hope of reversing their population decline, they're going to need to add about 6 million people of childbearing age within the next ten years, and there's really no way in Hell they're going to get that from "move to Russia" videos on the internet. And frankly, anyone thinking of moving there should probably read about what happened to the thousands of Americans who were lured to Stalin's USSR (Petersen).

Even if their economy withstands sanctions (which I doubt), even if they manage to pull something they can call "victory" out of their genocidal war in Ukraine (which looks less likely with each passing day), even if they can convince North Korea to use its superior power to back them up (and oh, how the mighty have fallen when that wasn't even sarcasm), they can't fight a demographic trend this long-running and this bleak.
Of course, this doesn't mean they're not dangerous. We like to use a bear as a symbol for Russia, and anyone who has been around bears (or any other predator) will tell you that the time a bear is the most dangerous is when it is wounded, terrified, and in pain. This bear's death throes will likely last the rest of this decade, and Ukraine won't be the only one mauled as it thrashes around (Boot). But regardless of how much damage they do on their way out, Russia is dying. And frankly, I say this as one who once loved Russia, who watched Russia's barbarism with his own eyes, and who lost friends, neighbors, and students to Russia's murderous hordes.
After everything we've witnessed from Russia in the past two years, I'm in agreement with Jim Kirk on this one.

Works Cited

Abnett, Kate (1). "Europe experienced second-warmest winter on record." Reuters. 9 Mar, 2023. Web. 27 Sep, 2023. https://www.reuters.com/business/environment/europe-experienced-second-warmest-winter-record-2023-03-08/

Abnett, Kate (2). "Europe slashed winter gas use amid energy crisis." Reuters. 21 Feb, 2023. Web. 27 Sep, 2023. https://www.reuters.com/business/energy/europe-slashed-winter-gas-use-amid-energy-crisis-2023-02-21/

Anischuk, Alexei & Gutterman, Steve. "Population, Russian values key to our future - Putin." Reuters. 12 Dec, 2012. Web. 25 Sep, 2023. https://www.reuters.com/article/uk-russia-putin/population-russian-values-key-to-our-future-putin-idUKBRE8BB0JF20121212

BBC Staff. "Russia's Putin seeks to stimulate birth rate." BBC. 15 Jan, 2020. Web. 25 Sep, 2023. https://www.bbc.com/news/world-europe-51120165

Bender, Jeremy. "PHOTO: An Orthodox bishop blesses Russian missiles for airstrikes in Syria." Business Insider. 16 Oct, 2015. Web. 23 Sep, 2023. https://www.businessinsider.com/orthodox-priest-blesses-missiles-2015-10

Boot, Max. "Opinion: Russia's population crisis is making Putin more dangerous." Calgary Herald. Mar 25, 2023. Web. 25 Sep, 2023. https://calgaryherald.com/opinion/columnists/opinion-russias-population-crisis-is-making-putin-more-dangerous

Cabot, Cyrielle. "Population decline in Russia: ‘Putin has no choice but to win’ in Ukraine." 24 May, 2022. Web. 25 Sep, 2023. https://www.france24.com/en/europe/20220524-population-decline-in-russia-putin-has-no-other-choice-but-to-win-in-ukraine

Chingaev, Yaroslav. "Russia Marks Record 12-Month Population Decline." Moscow Times. 13 Oct, 2021. Web. 25 Sep, 2023. https://www.themoscowtimes.com/2021/10/11/russia-records-record-12-month-population-decline-a75262

Cocco, Federica & Ivanova, Polina. "Ukraine war threatens to deepen Russia’s demographic crisis." Financial Times. 3 Apr, 2022. Web. 25 Sep, 2023. https://www.ft.com/content/8c576a9c-ba65-4fb1-967a-fc4fa5457c62

Coynash, Halya. "Kremlin-funded RT presenter claims Ukraine is Russian land that Russia will ‘take back’ by force." Human Rights in Ukraine. 17 Jan, 2022. Web. 25 Sep, 2023. https://khpg.org/en/1608809975

Dickinson, Peter. "Putin admits Ukraine invasion is an imperial war to 'return' Russian land." 10 Jun, 2022. Web. 25 Sep, 2023. https://www.atlanticcouncil.org/blogs/ukrainealert/putin-admits-ukraine-invasion-is-an-imperial-war-to-return-russian-land/

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