In Russia, issues when it comes to a family.
Vera and her husband Timofey have 8 young people, from 18-year-old Sofiya to 18-month-old Marusya, and have just been crowned Moscow’s family of the year.
“It’s an honor and a joy,” Vera Asachyova told Sky News when asked how it felt to win.
“It brings pride to our family, not only my husband and I but for the children and their grandmothers and grandfathers.”
And that’s not their only award.
Having had so many children, they’ve also been honoured with the prestigious Order of Parental Glory, which Vera proudly wears pinned to her chest.
The radiant faces of the family appear even in the advertising posters of the city.
They present themselves as a style circle of relatives doing their patriotic duty.
That’s because Russia’s birth rate is at a quarter-of-a-century low and the state wants others to follow the Asachyovs’ lead.
Official data shows 599,600 children were born in Russia in the first half of 2024, which is 16,000 fewer than in the same period in 2023 and the lowest since 1999.
The Kremlin has called the figure “catastrophic” and is desperate to bring him to life.
The latest attempt is a ban on “childfree propaganda”, which was passed unanimously by Russia’s lower house of parliament last month.
Its objective is to promote a life without children, and who has extended now can be fined.
But does this propaganda exist? Even if this were the case, are there really more compelling reasons why a woman might not need to have children?
For example the costs involved, or perhaps because their partner is away fighting in Ukraine, or worse, has been killed there.
I present this to Tatiana Butskaya, deputy of the Russian ruling party, United Russia, who is in the Parliamentary Commission for the Protection of the Circle of Relatives.
“It’s an ideological life on earth,” he replied, referring to the so-called propaganda.
“If [our parents] had bought into this ideology, none of us would be at this press convention today. Maybe it would be other people here and even robots. “
Vladimir Putin has encouraged women in the past to have at least three children to ensure the future of Russia.
In the same spirit, Mrs. Vookskaya criticized her unmarried son, calling them “strangers. “
“If this circle of relatives has been living in combination for a long time, you’re thinking, ‘Well, maybe they have diseases? Maybe something is in the circle of relatives,’ right?”
“They’ve lived together for 30 years and only given birth to only one child. There’s something wrong there.”
According to the authorities, pro-youth propaganda is ubiquitous: in movies, on the Internet and in the media. But that’s what it feels like to walk through Moscow.
You almost look, there are massive billboards selling a circle of relatives and motherhood. The message on one says “We have room to grow” in Russian.
Russia insists that women still have the right not to have children, but feminist activists like Zalina Marshenkulova that is no longer true.
The prominent blogger left Russia at a time after the full-scale invasion of Ukraine and accused of “justifying terrorism” through a Russian court earlier this year.
“It’s reproductive violence,” she told Sky News, referring to the ban on childfree propaganda. “It’s another repressive law they needed to turn all women into mechanisms for reproducing slaves.
“If you’re smart, if you love freedom, if you respect yourself, you can’t live in Russia. That’s what they try to say to us by this stupid law.”
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A low birth rate isn’t Russia’s only demographic problem, of course. It also has a rising mortality rate, made worse by the war in Ukraine.
Stopping the war would help boost the population. But that’s not discussed.
Apparently, childfree propaganda is the bigger issue.