RUSSIA: Russian President Vladimir Putin has revived a Soviet-era award of "Mother Heroine" for those women who have ten or more children. This comes amid Moscow facing a demographic crisis which has been aggravated during the ongoing Russia-Ukraine war. 

Stalin created the "Mother Heroine" medal in 1944, during the end of World War-II, when the Soviet Union is estimated to have killed 26 million people.

Women who give birth to 10 or more children will receive the award. Putin signed a decree on Monday that states eligible persons would get a payment of one million rubles (about USD 16,000) after their tenth child reaches one.
Since many years, Russia's population has been slowly falling, and this tendency seems to have gotten worse recently.

\The Moscow Times reported in July, citing the official statistics office Rosstat, that between January and May, the population of Russia decreased at a record rate of 86,000 individuals per month. According to a report by demographer Alexei Raksha, between October 2020 and September 2021, the population of Russia decreased by 997,000, which was mostly caused by COVID-19. The population loss in Russia during this time period was the biggest ever observed in peacetime.

Putin has said before that Russia's dwindling population "haunts" him.

When the Soviet Union fell in 1991, the Russian population was nearly 148.3 million, per the World Bank. In 2022, it stands at 145.1 million, the Times reported last month.

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