Russia will feel the consequences of the demographic crisis of the 1990s in the years to come, President Vladimir Putin said at the XI Congress of Perinatal Medicine in Moscow on Saturday, June 22. “In the 1990s our country faced the severest demographic crisis. We have not yet felt its consequences but they will reflect on the economy, social sphere and industrial development. Unfortunately, we will experience this in the next several years,” Putin said. He noted that better care of mothers and children as well as the reduction of maternal and child mortality are two of the eight Millennium Development Goals adopted by the U.N. in 2000. Russia shares them. “Almost two million children are born in Russia annually. Last year the birth rate reached the average European one… Infant mortality has decreased by 50 percent over the past ten years,” the president said. He said that a big prenatal federal centre would open in Moscow in 2014.