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Notes -
The coming Ukraine/Russia baby boom?
There's a theory that one part of falling fertility is female hypergamy. Since my spellchecker is underlining that word, I'll define it like this:
Female hypergamy is when women seek to marry "up", either into a higher social class or to a mate who is superior to them.
It's harder than ever for women to marry up. Modern femininist societies devalue male traits such as stoicism and aggression but highly value female traits such as conformity and self-control. As a result, women's status relative to men has risen greatly. This has the side effect of making most men undesirable to most women.
You know what raises the status of men? Fighting in wars. It's no secret that women love men in uniform. And many will confess to being aroused by male violence. For better or worse, violence raises male status.
Nearly all nations had a baby boom after WWII. And this wasn't merely making up for lost time. In the United States, the fertility rate peaked at 3.74 children/woman in 1957. Even Russia had a fertility rate near 3 despite a ridiculously lopsided gender ratio where more than 80% of men born in 1922 didn't survive until 1946.
So anyway... I predict that Russia and Ukraine will experience a similar (but smaller boom) in the decade following the end of the war.
That's what the Russian government has been betting on long term. They plan to introduce a project called "Time of Heroes" to provide additional training for the veterans and "make them the new elite". The plan is to insert the veterans as educators, allow them to become government officials.
There was a project like this called "School of Governors" which initially aimed to create new cadre for leading the whole regions of Russia, which, IMO, wasn't successful because most of the participants of the school already had connections. It kind of legitimizes the governor positions of the people who graduated it but the participants were specifically handpicked to participate in the program. Kirienko was the organizer and from my understanding "Time of Heroes" is going to follow the same template.
So, in addition to the natural affinity towards the men in the uniform, the government is also planning to boost their attractiveness artificially via increasing their social status. I have reasons to doubt that the program will be successful due to the previous implementations being faulty, but in general I think you hit the nail on the head in this regard.
I am Russian, so I can theorize/speculate about Russia and I'm not that in tune with the trends in Ukraine. All that said, commenting on your thesis in general, outside of the objective measures taken to increase the fertility (like subsidies) and subjective status increase of men (a quick glance through the studies didn't produce anything conclusive about the attractiveness of the males in the uniform), I don't think we can definitively conclude that the conditions in Russia and Ukraine will be conducive to increasing fertility in general. The main reason, in my opinion, is the current cultural environment, which might act as a counterbalance to the conditions you describe. Short theses before I go back to work:
That's interesting. From what you say, it seems like the Russian government has been trying to appeal to women, but totally failing. Instead they've created a narrative that appeals to (some of) men, the conservative trad patriotic men, including some of us in other countries (the ones who don't actually have to fight in the war anyway). I wonder what they'll do going forward? Would they be open to allowing immigration from the sort of men and trad-wife couples from overseas that want that sort of culture, or will they insist on being Slavic-only?
I haven't gotten the impression that immigration is restricted for overseas people in Russia all that much. Anti-immigration talk focuses on Middle Asia - cheap labor, Muslim, etc.
There are barriers that would deter a 1st world immigrant. You have to learn the language (less important for Middle Asian immigrants who aren't taking high-level jobs and have many of their own countrymen at the jobs they do take), and you'll have to go through conscription if you're a male 30 (27 until recently) and under. Again, conscription is likely less undesirable for someone already used to a hard life, if not desirable (being fed, clothed, roofed and given an express course in conversational Russian).
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