Russia’s Depopulation Crisis Deepens As Government Writes Off Whole Towns
Over the past two years, the abandonment of towns across Russia’s regions has accelerated dramatically. According to official data, 266 populated villages and towns were completely removed from existence across Russia over the past year alone. The year before that, another 306 villages and hamlets ceased to exist. In total, more than 500 populated places have disappeared in just two years—wiped off administrative maps because no one lives there anymore.
This is not a marginal phenomenon affecting remote tundra outposts or isolated Arctic settlements. The regions leading this collapse are what Moscow itself calls historical Russian regions—the very heartland the state claims to defend, preserve, and glorify.
At the top of the list is the Kostroma region, where more than 100 populated areas have vanished for the second year in a row. This is not an anomaly or a one-off demographic blip. It is a sustained, accelerating process of internal decay. Villages empty out, infrastructure collapses, schools close, roads disappear, and eventually the settlement is formally abolished. The state does not rebuild them. It erases them.
Other regions follow the same pattern. Vologda, Novgorod, Perm, Kemerovo, Irkutsk, Orenburg—names that once symbolized Russia’s rural backbone are now appearing in tables tracking extinction. Entire communities vanish not because of war or natural disaster, but because the state has abandoned them entirely.
This is what makes the current Russian war policy so grotesque.
While hundreds of Russian villages are dying every year, the Kremlin is simultaneously deploying tens of thousands of people to seize villages in Ukraine. Instead of investing in roads, clinics, housing, schools, and jobs to keep its own countryside alive, Russia sends men to occupy, shell, and ultimately destroy villages in Ukrainian regions—villages that were functioning, populated, and alive before Russian troops arrived.
It is not expansion. It is substitution through destruction.
Russia does not conquer in order to build. It conquers because it cannot sustain life at home. Its own territories rot from neglect, corruption, and demographic collapse, and instead of addressing that reality, the state exports violence outward. The result is a cycle in which Russia devastates others while continuing to hollow itself out.
The metaphor that fits is not empire. It is infestation.
Like a locust plague, the system consumes what remains in one place, leaves it barren, and moves on. Like a fungus, it destroys its own host tissue first, then spreads outward, incapable of creating anything healthy or lasting. Villages die at home. Villages burn abroad.
The tragedy is not only Ukrainian. It is Russian as well. A state that cannot preserve its own land, its own people, or its own future chooses instead to deny those things to others. It cannot build a decent life for itself—and it refuses to let others live one either.
Russia is dying and the world will be better off because of it.