This is the embarrassing moment a Russian state television presenter announces her plan to get pregnant after Vladimir Putin’s call for women to give birth to avoid a demographic crisis.
Natalya Litovko, 43, announced that she and her husband had been inspired by the Kremlin leader’s call in his State of the Union address to do their patriotic duty and procreate.
She told Rossiya 24 viewers live on television about her mission to increase the size of her family. The faithful presenter already has two children.
Russia’s population is declining, in part because of its war-torn economy, which is mired in trouble and failing to satisfy regular consumers.
The human cost of its conflict with Ukraine, in which hundreds of thousands of Russians have been killed and maimed, is also a factor.
Natalya Litovko, 43, announced that she and her husband had been inspired by the Kremlin leader’s call in his State of the Union address to do their patriotic duty and procreate.
She told Rossiya 24 live viewers about her mission to increase the size of her family. The faithful presenter already has two children
“Talking about the (new) national project: the family,” Litovka announced smiling.
“My husband just texted me to tell me we’re having a third child.”
His co-host, evidently bewildered, told viewers: “Well, we’ll tell you about that later.”
Putin has been obsessed for some time with the falling birth rate and rarely misses an opportunity to ask women to have more babies.
Recently, he lectured workers at a missile plant about the need to have more than two children.
“Constant work is necessary aimed at improving the quality of life of families with children and supporting the birth rate,” he stated today.
‘It is our religion and our moral values that are in the foreground here.
‘Large families must become the norm. In the next six years we have to reach a sustainable birth rate.’
He announced that state money would be injected into regions with a low birth rate to improve incentives to have more children.
He did not explain why – after 25 years as president or prime minister – he had allowed Russia to face such a crisis.
He was sure that the West was taking the wrong path.
“The main purpose of the family is the birth of children, the continuation of the human race, the upbringing of children and therefore the continuation of the existence of our multinational people,” he told the nation.
‘We see what is happening in some countries, which deliberately destroy the norms of morality, the institution of the family, pushing entire peoples to extinction and degeneration.
“But we choose life.”
He added: ‘Russia has been and remains a bastion of traditional values on which human civilization is built.
“Our choice is shared by the majority of people in the world, including millions of citizens of Western countries.”
“Constant work is needed aimed at improving the quality of life of families with children and supporting the birth rate,” Putin said today in his annual speech in Moscow.
Putin did not inform Russians how many children he has.
The Russian president never talks about this aspect of his life or his marital status, but he is believed to have had five or six children with at least three women.
He had two daughters with his ex-wife Lyudmila Putina, once Russia’s first lady.
The oldest is Maria Vorontsova, 38 years old, a geneticist and expert on dwarfism, she is a leading researcher at the National Medical Research Center in Endocrinology of the Russian Ministry of Health.
Some experts consider her the new Minister of Health of Russia.
His sister Katerina Tikhonova, 37, a former rock ‘n’ roll dancer turned mathematician, is general director of the National Foundation for Intellectual Development in Russia.
Another daughter is 20-year-old Luiza Rozova, also known as Elizaveta Vladimirovna Krivonogikh, who is studying design in the West during her father’s war in Ukraine.
His mother is Putin’s former long-time lover, cleaner-turned-billionaire Svetlana Krivonogikh, 48.
Putin is believed to have two or three secret children with his “secret wife” Alina Kabaeva, 40, a former Olympic gold-winning rhythmic gymnast.
Almost nothing is known about them, but rumors suggest that they are two boys and a girl.
One is believed to have been born in 2015 in Switzerland and another in 2019 in Moscow.
They are raised in several Putin palaces guarded by the FSO security service near Moscow and on the Black Sea.