
According to World Health Organization estimates, life expectancy in 2019 for 15-year-old Russian males was essentially indistinguishable from 15-year-old males in Haiti. This is not a typo. The estimate for both Haiti and Russia was 53.7 years. That teenage Russian male stood worse survival chances in Russia than in 23 of the 46 countries the United Nations categorizes as “least developed” — among them Mali, Yemen, and even war-decimated Afghanistan. Projecting from 2019 survival trajectories, over one in four 20-year-old males will die before their 60th birthday. The corresponding risk in Europe is only half that high — and those European aggregates, remember, are distorted by including Russia in them.