The first one, the COVID-19 pandemic, proved particularly harmful to countries such as Belarus, where the government failed to introduce any major restrictions while at the same time concealing the number of deaths due to the disease. When asked by journalists to explain this, officials cited “a need for additional data verification”
As a consequence, fewer people of reproductive age decided to have more than one child, which translated into a change in the family model. As a consequence, the proportion of individuals of working age to senior citizens was 2
Since the beginning of the 1990s, Belarus’s demographic situation has seen a steady decline in its population. Another group of emigrants decided to leave the country due to declining living standards and insufficient career opportunities
In 2020, as a result of a violent wave of repression following the rigged presidential election, the process of depopulation accelerated significantly, while politically-driven emigration was mainly practiced by the country’s highest-skilled citizens, social activists and specialists, including those active in the IT sector. At the same time, the Belarusian government is increasingly concerned about depopulation and, in particular, about the fact that the highest-skilled professionals are emigrating