Head of Russia's Kurchatov Institute Mikhail Kovalchuk Claims Western LGBT Support Aims to Reduce Population
On Friday, October 9, 2026, Mikhail Kovalchuk, president of Russia’s National Research Center “Kurchatov Institute,” claimed that state support for LGBT rights in Western nations is designed to curb birth rates and artificially reduce global population numbers. The physicist made these remarks in an interview with the Russian business magazine Politika, excerpts of which were reported by the state news agency RIA Novosti.
According to the 79-year-old scientist, cyber threats and biosecurity have emerged alongside nuclear deterrence as paramount global risks. Kovalchuk argued that rapid automation and the rise of artificial intelligence will eliminate numerous occupations, making large populations economically redundant. “This means that people in previous numbers are no longer globally needed for further development, and the West has purposefully launched a population reduction system. The first element of this is LGBT: live in non-traditional ways so there are no offspring,” the head of the research center claimed.
In the same interview, Kovalchuk asserted that Western elites simultaneously require a dedicated caste of workers—termed “service humans”—characterized by “restricted consciousness and controlled reproduction” to carry out narrow operational functions. He claimed that efforts to engineer this category of people have been pursued for decades and have “succeeded.” The physicist linked developments in modern genetics not only to personalized medicine, but also to biological warfare and the alleged bioengineering of submissive human populations.
Mikhail Kovalchuk is a specialist in X-ray crystallography and a corresponding member of the Russian Academy of Sciences. Since 2005, he has led the Kurchatov Institute, one of Russia’s principal state nuclear and multidisciplinary research institutions. In Russian and international media, Kovalchuk is widely recognized as a prominent policymaker in state science initiatives and a close associate of the Russian leadership. The scientist has voiced similar arguments in the past: in September 2015, during an address to Russia’s Federation Council, he alleged that global elites were attempting to breed a “subspecies of service humans” by undermining traditional family structures and promoting LGBT values. Biologists and demographic scholars have consistently dismissed these claims as unfounded conspiracy theories, explaining that lower fertility rates and the expansion of minority protections across developed nations are driven by urbanization, living standards, and civil liberties rather than coordinated depopulation schemes.
Demographic arguments and criticism of Western social values are frequently invoked by Russian and allied officials to justify legal restrictions against sexual minorities. Previously, Urania reported on statements by the Prosecutor General of Belarus labeling LGBT and childfree information a direct threat to demographic security, and examined enforcement statistics under Russia’s “LGBT propaganda” ban along with court rulings upholding blanket prohibitions on LGBT civil rights advocacy in Russia.
