For Mikhail, war is the same work as hoeing a vegetable garden. Only more profitable. The Kremlin spends tens of billions of euros within the economy of death.
The father and son of 35-year-old Russian soldier Daniil Dumenko, who died fighting in Ukraine, stand by his coffin during his funeral in the Russian city of Vozhsky, near Volgograd.
In the summer of 2024, he was at the front three times, participating in the Russian offensive in the Kharkiv region of eastern Ukraine. He was wounded twice. He has a punctured ear drum, shrapnel scars on his body. But he doesn’t regret anything – in three months he managed to earn more than he did in years in civilian life.
A soldier from Eastern Siberia was interviewed by an internet magazine People of Baikal. Mikhail, whose name was changed by the editors so that he could speak without fear of retribution, boasted that he received three million rubles for each injury. Another 1.3 million was a bonus when he signed a contract with the army. That’s 7.3 million in total, plus a regular salary. Converted, this is a respectable sum of 68,000 euros.
“What good is seven million to you when you’re dead?” the reporter asked him.
Mikhail indicated that he is a fatalist. He believed that he would be lucky and so far it has basically worked out for him. However, he would no longer want to tempt fate.
In a short time, he saw too many “two hundred” (code name for dead) and “sad” (wounded) in the combat zone. And so he decided to describe in all drastic detail the “meat grinder” that ground up many of his comrades. They, like him, saw neither patriotism nor meaning in the war, only a lot of money.
“Why did you decide to tell all this?” the reporter asked him.
“So that there are fewer naive fools,” answered Mikhail. “There were many nineteen- to twenty-year-old boys among the new contractors. Some were told that they would only screw up the light bulbs in the unit, others think that they are easy-earned panacea, while it can be done somewhere in the leeward side. But no one will sit through it. Without acquaintances, contacts, they won’t mess with you,” he added.
Despite the record losses of the Russian army, the vision of quick money is still stronger than the fear of death or the rest of life spent in a wheelchair. Vladimir Putin has not had to announce another unpopular mobilization since the fall of 2022, when he called up 300,000 reservists. Every day, more and more hundreds of new contractors flock to the recruitment centers to sign up for the army. The intelligence services of the United States and Britain estimate their number at 25,000 to 30,000 per month.
“War is now a rational economic choice in the walking Russian countryside,” the newspaper wrote this week. Wall Street Journal (WSJ), according to which in some of the poorest regions of the country, military salaries are five times higher than the local average. In addition, the families of the fallen receive high compensation from the government.
For the families of the recruits, these sums are life-changing. Russian economist Vladislav Inozemtsev calculated that the family of a 35-year-old man who fought for a year and then died on the battlefield will receive approximately 14.5 million rubles, which is equivalent to 140 thousand euros, from his salary and death compensation. This is more than the individual would earn in aggregate if he worked in the civilian sector until the age of 60 in some regions. Families are also entitled to additional bonuses and insurance premium payments.
“Going to the front and dying after a year is economically more profitable than living,” Inozemtsev ironically remarked to the WSJ, calling this phenomenon the “economy of death.”
The economy of death for the state is not a cheap matter. Economists calculated that Russia paid out 28.5 billion euros from June 2023 to June 2024 just for compensation for survivors of fallen soldiers.
Another tens of billions of euros go to the wounded and maimed soldiers. This week, President Putin ordered a one-time payment for participants in the war in Ukraine who suffered injuries resulting in disability to be increased to four million rubles (38,000 euros).
In the presidential decree, published on Thursday on the official website legal information portals it is stated that the state will retroactively pay this amount also to soldiers who suffered serious injuries during the past two and three-quarter years since the beginning of the invasion of Ukraine.
Just a day before, the Russian government had adopted a resolution on the amount of payments for combat injuries and maimings, introducing a differentiation between light and severe injuries. Until now, the sum of 3 million rubles belonged to wounded soldiers, regardless of the severity of the health damage. The Cabinet of Mikhail Mishustin he reduced the amount of payment for a minor injury to one million rubles, while keeping it at three million for a serious injury. However, after critical responses published by several military bloggers, Putin added one million more to the seriously wounded.
Source: spravy.pravda.sk
