Russia’s war against Ukraine has been going on for four years so far, recently becoming longer than the epic clash between Nazi Germany and the Soviet Union. It’s the bloodiest military action that has erupted in Europe in the past three-quarters of a century. According to competing estimates, between 350,000 and 450,000 people on both sides have died,1 and at least a million have been wounded and maimed2. The Kremlin’s brutal attack on the neighboring country has generated the largest influx of refugees into united Europe; the number of migrants from Ukraine currently residing in EU countries3 is four times higher than the peak total of refugees arriving from Syria after 2014,4 and more than ten times the number of those who fled to the EU from the conflicts in former Yugoslavia.5 In Russia, the wave of emigration triggered by the outbreak of the war and the so-called “partial mobilization” of 2022 has become the “exodus of the century”6.
1 — The number of Russian servicemen killed is now estimated at between 239,000 and 345,000. See: “Sgoraûŝie na peredovoj: tret’ podtverždennyh pogibših v Ukraine rossijskih voennyh—dobrovol’cy” [Burning on the front lines: one third of confirmed dead Russian military personnel in Ukraine are volunteers], BBC, December 12, 2025, available at: www.bbc.com . For Ukrainian casualties, see: S. Pelley, “Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy: The 2025 60 Minutes Interview transcript”, СBS News, April 13, 2025, available at: www.cbsnews.com.
2 — “The Russia-Ukraine War Report Card”, RussiaMatters, November 19, 2025, available at: www.russiamatters.org.
3 — “Temporary protection for 4.3 million in October”, Eurostat, December 10, 2025, available at: https://ec.europa.eu.
4 — M. Barlai et al, The Migrant Crisis: European Perspectives and National Discourses, LIT Verlag, Münster, 2017.
5 — M. Barutciski, “ЕU States and the Refugee Crisis in the Former Yugoslavia”, Refuge: Canada’s Journal on
Refugees, Vol. 14, No. 3, 1994, pp. 32-35.6 — V. Inozemtsev, “The Exodus of the Century: A New Wave of Russian Emigration”, Russie.Eurasie.Visions, No. 128, Ifri, June 2023, available at: www.ifri.org.
However, despite the enormous losses of human life, unimaginable financial and material costs, and even a probability of the conflict escalating into a new world war, most Russians are treating the current situation without undue drama. Anxiety in Russian society in recent months has been far less widespread than it was in the summer of 20227, even though the war often affects the country’s civilian population as the Ukrainian attacks on Russian targets intensify. Yes, sociologists mention a growing weariness with what is happening, but this hasn’t translated into protest, let alone into a sustained rejection of Putin’s policy. Oddly enough, the opaque term “special military operation”, coined by the Kremlin, nowadays seems quite an adequate characterization of how the events are perceived by a significant portion of the Russian people, who refrain from considering the ongoing conflict “a real war”, and not simply because the Kremlin demands it.
Such an attitude looks understandable; for someone raised in Soviet society and steeped in its cultural canons, war will forever remain associated with a complete disruption to the normal way of life, loss of homes and property, shortages, ration cards for food and basic necessities, irregular working hours, forced loans and restrictions on movement. Russians today face nothing of the sort8. The most obvious and fundamental difference between what is happening and a “real war” is the absence of mass mobilization (when the Kremlin attempted to implement its “partial” version in the fall of 2022, it became clear that the cost of such a move was far too high and could not be scaled up)9. On the contrary, the choice made by “volunteers” deciding to enroll in the army and proceed to the frontline appears to be their private affair. The risks they take concern only their families and their loved ones, whose protests are very rare and, recently, do not even require reactions similar to those taken by the authorities in the first months after the “partial mobilization” (certainly, there is nothing resembling the waves of public discontent that characterized the period of the First Chechen war).
7 — “Dominanty. Pole mnenij. Vypusk 39” [Dominants. Field of opinions. Issue 39], Public Opinion Foundation (FOM), October 7, 2022, available at: https://fom.ru; “Dominanty. Pole mnenij. Vypusk 49” [Dominants. Field of opinions. Issue 49], Public Opinion Foundation (FOM), December 12, 2025, available at: https://fom.ru.
8 — V. Inozemtsev, “Warum die Russen gegenüber dem Krieg so gleichgültig sind” [Why Russians are so indifferent to the war], Die Presse, January 20, 2025, available at: www.diepresse.com.
9 — V. Inozemtsev, “Ždet li Rossiû novaâ mobilizaciâ?” [Will Russia face a new mobilization?], Riddle, April 11, 2024, available at: https://ridl.io.
It is precisely this reliance not on conscription or even on contract service (as with an army in which servicemen are paid more or less a given country’s average wage, as in Europe or in the United States) but on a mercenary army that allows Vladimir Putin to continue a war in which his soldiers and officers often descend into primitive barbarism. At the same time, the money the Kremlin pays both those who are killing their fellow Orthodox Slavs and the relatives of those perished in action is turning into a considerable stimulus for the ailing Russian economy. According to estimates by both Russian and European experts, the military salaries and death gratuities paid by the authorities both when the soldiers are sent to the front and when they die there now reaches 3-4 trillion rubles annually10, or close to 2% of Russia’s GDP. A person who enlists in the army in an average Russian region fights for a year and is killed in action (with all the necessary evidence) earns for his family members money he could not have earned over fifteen or twenty years, and in some cases even twenty-five years of work in the civilian sector in his region. Thus, death is becoming the most economically effective way one can live one’s life in Putin’s Reich11.
10 — “Tri trilliona živym i mertvym: za poslednie 12 mesâcev vyplaty voûûŝim rossijskim soldatam, a takže ranenym i sem’âm pogibših sostavili summu, èkvivalentnuû 1,5% VVP” [Three trillion for the living and the dead: over the past 12 months, payments to Russian soldiers at war, as well as to the wounded and families of the dead, amounted to the equivalent of 1.5 percent of GDP], Re:Russia, July 16, 2024, available at: https://re-russia.net.
11 — V. Inozemtsev, “Putinskaâ ‘Cmertonomika’” [Putin’s “Deathonomics”], Riddle, July 10, 2023, available at: https://ridl.io.
All this may seem monstrous to an ordinary person, but it conceals an even more horrifying reality. In a country where living standards have risen significantly in recent decades, the high compensation for such extreme risk is not attractive to everyone.
Therefore, the majority of those recruited are either criminals or pauperized individuals; people in dire straits (who have lost their jobs, cannot pay off loans, or desperately need to provide for their families); or those performing temporary, low-paid, unskilled jobs. In any case, these are people who are not a significant resource for the economy—and therefore deathonomics can be defined as the transformation of economically useless lives into a tangible financial asset12. The apparent monstrous nature of this assertion should not obscure its economic content. Putin’s reckless war remains so acceptable to Russians from many perspectives precisely because it does not directly destroy its human capital (which is degraded to a much greater extent by emigration than by military losses), but allows for the redistribution of considerable resources to depressed regions and low-income social groups. The primary economic benefits are realized “here and now”, while all the negative consequences —from demographic decline to emerging technological backwardness—are postponed to the future.
This routinization of war and death, the natural outcome of deathonomics, actually strengthens Putin’s regime as it combines into a coherent blend the self-sacrifice presented by Kremlin ideologists as a Russian “traditional virtue”13 and the primitive economic logic that nurtures today’s mercenary military. Deathonomics ultimately becomes the brutal know-how of the modern Russian regime, embodying its inhumane character and creating a solid economic foundation for its stability.
12 — V Inozemtsev, “Vstavaj, proklât’em zaklejmennyj! Ničtožnaâ žizn’ kak aktiv” [Rise up, cursed with a curse! A paltry life as an asset], The Moscow Times, November 5, 2025, available at: https://ru.themoscowtimes.com.
13 — See: A. Kharichev, “Kto my?” [Who are we?], Gosudarstvo, No. 2, ANO Runivers, Moscow, 2025, pp. 16–25, available at: https://new.runivers.ru.