Crucially, however, the Proekt report cited OECD migration data published by the destination countries, which doesn't necessarily indicate that incoming Russians actually arrived from Russia. Instead, these "persons holding a Russian nationality arriving from anywhere" could, for example, be Russian citizens who emigrated from France to Germany. This could explain why the OECD figures diverge so much from Rosstat's numbers, as the latter only tallies people leaving Russia. But while the gap between the Russian and international numbers is simply too large to suggest that the difference consists of Russians migrating from third countries to the likes of the United States or Germany, it is likely an exaggeration to claim that the true rate of emigration is six times as high as the Rosstat figures; instead, the reality is somewhere in between.

What Awaits Russia

When it comes to projections for Russia's overall population, the country is currently projected to lose about 8 percent of its population by 2050 according to the United Nations. (Rosstat does not publish such projections.) Naturally, larger emigration numbers would accelerate the population decline. But given the incongruous data sets, it's difficult to project a precise timeline for Russia's downward demographic trend.

Another factor to consider is the Kremlin's efforts to offset its population decline and emigration trends. According to the Russian business daily Kommersant, the Russian government plans to attract 5 million to 10 million migrants from neighboring countries with large Russian-speaking populations, including Kazakhstan, Uzbekistan, Ukraine and Moldova, to offset Russia's population decline over the next six years. The government's efforts to attract migrants, as well as it bid to encourage more births, managed to hold the population trend steady in recent years, but 2018 was the first year since 2008 in which Russia's population dropped in absolute terms, falling by 93,500 to 148.8 million people. The country's current plan to attract at least 5 million migrants in just over five years, however, is far more ambitious.