Moscow: Russian President Vladimir Putin on Tuesday announced boosting Russia's population will be ‘our goal for the coming decades’.
Addressing the World Russian People's Council in Moscow, Putin urged women to have eight children, making larger families the ‘norm’.
Putin’s call comes in the midst of concerns over falling birth rate in the country since 1990s.
Adding to the situation, Russia lost 300,000 lives to Ukraine War beginning February last year, according to The Independent.
‘Many of our ethnic groups have preserved the tradition of having strong multigenerational families with four, five, or even more children. Let us remember that Russian families, many of our grandmothers and great-grandmothers had seven, eight, or even more children,’ Putin was quoted as saying.
Putin said that families should be the foundation of state and society alongside being a spiritual phenomenon and a source of morality.
He urged Russians to ‘preserve and revise’ its tradition of having large families, which he said must become a way of life for all Russian people.
‘Preserving and increasing the population of Russia is our goal for the coming decades and even generations ahead. This is the future of the Russian world, the millennium-old, eternal Russia,’ Putin reportedly said.
Representatives of several traditional outfits participated the conference called by the head of Russia's Orthodox Church, Patriarch Kirill.
Media report linked Putin’s call for large families to human casualties in the Ukraine war.
While UK's defence ministry put Russian casualties to more than 300,000, Russian policy group Re:Russia claimed an estimated 820,000-920,000 people to have fled the country.
Russia is facing spiraling workforce shortage and slowing economy following the sanctions imposed by the West reacting to the Ukraine war.