On May 12, 2026, Ksenia Lebedzeva appeared on the program Eto drugoye on the First Information TV Channel* and discussed what is happening in Lithuania and why it is dying out.
“And now the cherry on the šakotis [the national Lithuanian spit cake — ed. note]: demography. Only 17,500 children were born in Lithuania during the previous year, while nearly 37,000 people died. It is a dead-end situation.. The difference is easy to calculate.”
On April 29, the presenter reiterated the same point during a segment on Radio Minsk:
“Last year, 17,500 babies were born, and 37,000 people died. It is just a constant loss. They can try to scare us; they can say whatever they want. But I think we should just wait it out and see: they’ll die out on their own.”
Lithuania’s statistics, as reported by Lebedzeva, are accurate. However, the dead-end situation itself —. as the presenter called it — is not fundamentally different from the one in Belarus. The scale of the figures in Belarus is different, but the ratio of births to deaths is similar to that in Lithuania: in 2025, 54,257 children were born, while the number of deaths was twice as high at 116,530. The natural population loss in the two countries is nearly identical — almost 7 people per thousand inhabitants. This indicates that Belarus and Lithuania are shrinking at similar rates.
If last year’s demographic trends continue, the last resident in both countries would die in approximately 145 years. The only difference is that it will happen about ten months earlier in Lithuania.
On a separate note, Lebedzeva also discussed Latvia on Radio Minsk. She said that fewer than a million people actually live in the country.
“Latvia is a clear case. Today, if you look at SIM cards detected in the country, the number comes to less than one million. Yet just a few years ago, the population was around two million.”
This statement is not supported by data regarding active, connected SIM cards. There are more than 2 million SIMs in Latvia, of which individuals hold 1.8 million. This figure has remained stable for the past five years, with no significant changes.
Besides, there must be at least a million people living in Latvia, given that employers regularly pay social contributions for 800,000 employees. Additionally, some workers do not pay social security contributions. This amounts to approximately 900,000 employed residents alone — without including pensioners, children, or people outside the workforce.
Thus, Ksenia Lebedzeva presented the Baltic States as dying out on the First Information TV Channel, but she did not mention that Lithuania’s population is decreasing at a similar rate to Belarus’s. The claim that fewer than one million people live in Latvia is not supported by the data.
* The First Information TV Channel is another name for News.by, a media outlet owned by Belteleradiocompany.