Heroes and villains russia braces for eventual return of its enormous army

Heroes and villains russia braces for eventual return of its enormous army

As demobilisation brings them home, Russia faces wave of veterans carrying psychological scars from the war; sources say many will never again earn the generous salaries they now receive, fuelling discontent; the aim is to avoid the unrest that followed the Soviet Union’s war in Afghanistan For Russian wife killer Azamat Iskaliyev, the war was a one-way ticket out of jail.

The 37-year-old had served less than a third of a nine-year murder sentence — for stabbing his spouse to death in his car in the summer of 2021 because she wanted a divorce — when he was freed and pardoned by Russia in return for fighting in Ukraine.

The six-month battlefield stint didn’t diminish his appetite for violent revenge against women who spurned him.

After returning to civilian life, he knifed an ex-girlfriend more than 60 times in the shop where she worked in October last year after she rejected his advances. In July, he was jailed for over 19 years for the frenzied murder.

Iskaliyev’s case, pieced together from court records in the city of Saratov and local media reports from his hearings, is a shocking example of the social problems that could await Russia as hundreds of thousands of soldiers — some of them pardoned convicts — return home following an eventual end to the war.

“All told, over 1.5 million Russian men and women had participated in the war as of the start of 2025,” said Mark Galeotti, a British expert on Russia and author of a report on Moscow’s demobilisation challenges for the Global Initiative against Transnational Organized Crime. “As more and more of them begin to be demobilised and return home, Russia will see an influx of veterans...bearing the psychological impacts of war.”

Such concerns go all the way to the top, with Russian President Vladimir Putin viewing the prospect of an army returning en masse as a potential risk he wants carefully managed to avoid destabilising society and the political system he has built, three sources close to the Kremlin told Reuters.

The aim, one of the sources said, is to avoid a repeat of the social ructions that followed the end of the Soviet Union’s war in Afghanistan, when returning veterans helped fuel a wave of organised crime that blighted the 1990s. Many of those returning to civilian life will never earn anything like the generous salaries they now receive, which will create discontent, the same source said. An army recruit from Moscow, for example, can now make at least 5.2 million roubles ($65,000) in their first year in Ukraine, including an upfront signing-up bonus of 1.9 million roubles ($24,000) which alone is nearly as much as the average annual salary in the capital.

The challenges of managing returning veterans aren’t unique to Russia. A “substantial minority” of the roughly 2.7 million Americans who served in Vietnam, for example, suffered psychological and life-adjustment problems, according to the U.S. Department of Veterans Affairs.

A key difference about the war in Ukraine from many conflicts though is that both sides have deployed convicts on the battlefield.

Data from the Russian prison service and Ukraine’s intelligence services suggest that Russia has recruited 120,000-180,000 convicts to fight in Ukraine since 2022.

Those soldiers who have come home so far have mainly been convicts, those who have been badly wounded, or others deemed too old to fight. But most of the army — Mr. Putin has said almost 700,000 troops are fighting in Ukraine — are still there.

The Defence Ministry no longer releases convicts like Iskaliyev back into society after six months in Ukraine, having changed the rules in 2023, with officials saying it was unfair that criminals received better terms than ordinary volunteers. Now, like regular recruits who sign a contract, they must keep fighting until the war is over.

Civilians killed

Verstka, an independent Russian media outlet, calculated in October last year that almost 500 civilians had become victims of veterans returning from fighting in Ukraine.

Using open-source data on military crimes from media reports and Russian court records, the organisation said at least 242 people had been killed and another 227 gravely injured.

Russian authorities designated Verstka, whose publisher is based in Prague, a foreign agent in December 2023. They said the outlet opposed Moscow’s military operations in Ukraine and distributed unreliable information about Russian policies, allegations rejected by Verstka which says it rigorously checks facts and does not publish anything it is not 100% sure about.

A second of the sources close to the Kremlin told Reuters the government feared the impact a mass veteran return might have on the country’s tightly controlled political system.

Mr. Putin has already had a dangerous taste of the chaos that the forces he unleashed in Ukraine are capable of at home, when Wagner mercenary chief Yevgeny Prigozhin led a mutiny against the army’s top brass in June 2023.

The third source said the Kremlin, at Mr. Putin’s behest, had been working to manage potential problems with a slew of policies, programmes and appointments including helping veterans take part in regional elections last year and putting them forward for federal parliamentary elections next year.

Mr. Putin, who has said that “warriors” who fought in Ukraine are part of the “genuine elite,” has promised veterans prestigious careers and has taken a personal interest in an elite training programme called “The Time of Heroes” to prepare them for civilian leadership.

One veteran, a decorated tank commander called Artur Orlov, has been put in charge of the president’s Soviet-style youth movement “Movement of the First”. Another, former battalion commander Artyom Zhoga, was appointed as Putin’s special representative in the vast Urals region.

Four other veterans have been given jobs in the presidential administration, at least three have seats in the upper house of parliament, while others have been given jobs in different branches of regional government.

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