Below is just a taste of a very interesting and intensely argued op/ed published in Vzglyad by author Kirill Benediktov responding to the much-ballyhooed Joe Biden comments.  The translation comes via RealClearWorld’s Compass Blog – I recommend reading it in full.

And yes, goddamit we are going extinct. We must have the courage to acknowledge this – Russians are dying as a nation. Maybe for some ethnic groups, which are part of our multi-ethnic state, it is not true, but Russian women give too few births, while Russian men are dying too early – too little and too early for the people to survive. I do think about this “15-year factor” that Biden measures us by. No matter what sources he used – the National Intelligence Council or some other secret institution. But even according to open-source UN projections, in 2025, Russia will live only 116 million people, and by 2050 – no more than 100 million. Now, according to official population estimates, there are 142 million people in Russia. In the United States, by the way, there are now 300 million and by 2050, there will be 400 million people. This means that we will lose 26 million people in 15 years. As if all these years we would have been fighting a grueling, endless war, a war in which we are doomed to defeat in advance.