If Russia’s war in Ukraine ended tomorrow, Vladimir Putin would be forced to reckon with a powerful leviathan of his own creation that threatens to drown him.
Russia’s wartime posture has transformed the country’s economy to be heavily reliant on producing bullets instead of butter. But one dynamic of this wartime economy that deserves more attention is the precipitous expansion of Russia’s military under Putin without the guardrails of public accountability.
The Kremlin’s rapid recruitment of new troops since it escalated its war in Ukraine in 2022 has offered previously out-of-reach access to social, economic, and even some political mobility to hundreds of thousands of Russians. However, this path is littered with state-sponsored violence, control, and corruption. The volume of Russian soldiers running this gauntlet by deploying to Ukraine will transform Russian society in ways that Putin will struggle to control without resorting to further manipulation, repression, and violence.
Any pursuit of peace in Ukraine must take into account Putin’s strong disincentives to willingly end the war and in fact acknowledge that he has many reasons for wanting the war to continue. Putin will be reluctant to recall Russian troops from the front lines even under a peace plan that significantly favors Moscow’s demands, something that the United States must recognize. Sending Russian soldiers home could pose challenges to Putin’s narrative about the war and reveal how much it has truly cost Russian society.
To counter this, the United States and European nations should empower Ukraine to meet Putin’s aggression with unified strength and resolve by ensuring Ukraine can acquire the weapons and supplies it needs to prevail on the battlefield and by providing security guarantees as a key part of any potential peace plan.
Feeding the leviathan
Russian authorities have taken extraordinary measures to continuously recruit the estimated 30,000 to 40,000 soldiers Russia needs each month to maintain its frontline deployment of 700,000 troops in Ukraine and to achieve Putin’s mandate to maintain 1.5 million active military troops.
To fulfill these quotas without triggering the political backlash that mass conscription would surely induce, Moscow’s recruitment strategy preys on socially and economically vulnerable men from Russia’s poorest regions. For hundreds of thousands of Russian citizens living in economically stagnant areas, signing a military contract represents a relatively lucrative opportunity to increase their income and enhance their social standing.
The payout to a Russian soldier’s dependents if they are injured or killed in action can reach up to $200,000 – a life-changing amount that is often greater than the lifetime earnings of many households in impoverished regions of the country.
The promise of potential casualty payments to soldiers’ dependents has incentivized corruption by “black widows,” Russian women who may work independently or in collusion with organized crime networks to convince men to marry them and enlist in the military so that the women will be in a position to benefit from payouts once their husbands are sent to fight in Ukraine.
Russia has also notoriously turned to its own prison population to recruit (and sometimes force) convicted inmates to fight on the front lines in Ukraine. Promised an early release, income, and an opportunity to redeem their social standing, these mobilized prisoners are generally sent straight to the front to serve in stormtrooper units that put them at a higher risk of injury, capture, or death than other Russian soldiers. Even Russian detainees arrested for minor offenses and who have not been convicted in a court of law are being pressured to join Russia’s military to fulfill recruitment quotas.
Russia’s military employs a culture of violence, which it inflicts against its own ranks as much as it does the people of Ukraine. Russian soldiers have committed wide-ranging war crimes in Ukraine, including the bombing of hospitals, schools, and residential areas; enforced disappearances, torture, and summary executions; mistreatment of prisoners of war; the hunting of civilians with drones; sexual violence; targeting of religious leaders and practitioners; and kidnapping Ukrainian children.
The effects of this impunity for violence are already spilling back over into Russian society. More than 1,000 Russian citizens have been killed or injured by Russian soldiers who returned from fighting in Ukraine – a figure that is likely undercounted because of public censorship around military judicial proceedings that might otherwise reveal the true scope of the problem. Most of these cases have been perpetrated against a family member or close acquaintance. Drug and alcohol abuse by soldiers who have returned from Ukraine is often a factor.
Keeping Russian soldiers on a short leash
Amidst this backdrop, Russia’s leaders are concerned that returning veterans who have been publicly lauded as heroes in wartime propaganda could pose a credible future political challenge.
Putin has tried to stay a step ahead of this by recruiting former soldiers into his United Russia Party and launching a “Time of Heroes” campaign to ostensibly educate and retrain veterans for political careers. Marketed as a program to “lift up” combat veterans, the Time of Heroes program and other similar initiatives are actually designed to screen out overly ambitious candidates in favor of compliant, loyal, and unmemorable former soldiers who would be less likely to mount an independent political challenge, according to interviews with program personnel conducted by the independent Russian investigative media outlet Verstka.
The Kremlin is extremely aware that Russian soldiers could leverage their military service to build their own personal and political brands. Three popular Russian military bloggers were recently charged with terrorism and acting as foreign agents for publishing online commentaries that denounced corruption in Russian military supply and arms procurement which they saw as undermining the military’s capacity to fight effectively in Ukraine.
The June 2023 insurrection led by Wagner Group founder Yevgeny Prigozhin and the march by his mercenary forces on Moscow no doubt underscored to Putin that public displays of dissatisfaction and dissent can quickly spiral beyond control. Prigozhin’s death in a fiery plane crash just two months after his attempted rebellion sent a clear message that discord within Russia’s defense sector would not be tolerated.
Moscow’s heavy censorship and propaganda around what it frames as its “special military operation” in Ukraine has limited what the average Russian citizen knows about Russian military activities in Ukraine. The truth about the war – including systematic war crimes, the scale of Russian casualties, and the suffering that soldiers endured at the hands of their own Russian military commanders – would surely damage the country’s morale and cripple Putin’s approval rating if it were to be fully revealed to the Russian public.
Without a conflict to fight in Ukraine, Putin faces the risk that demobilized soldiers returning to Russia could reveal the true extent of the cost of the yearslong military operation.
This factor is a strong incentive for the Kremlin to seek other foreign venues where it can market its military machinery. Doing this would allow Russia to keep its soldiers employed and prevents them from returning home, where they might create pockets of instability.
Notably, Russia has significantly expanded its military relations and security footprint in sub-Saharan Africa in recent years. An end to the war in Ukraine could prompt Moscow to redirect additional Russian soldiers to that region to build on the 20,000-strong estimated footprint of active Russian mercenaries. Most of these soldiers were initially part of Wagner Group operations that, following Prigozhin’s death, have been brought under the direct control of Russia’s Ministry of Defense and subsequently rebranded as Africa Corps.
The path to lasting peace in Ukraine will require facing this leviathan head on. Appeasing Putin with a favorable peace deal will prompt him to redirect the monster, as the international community has witnessed Russia doing time and again by lending its security services to dictatorships in places such as Mali, Syria, and Venezuela.
The United States should not expect Russia’s current leadership to accept a peace agreement unless its military is subdued to the extent that its soldiers understand that they are fighting a losing battle. The United States will need to demonstrate nothing less than full support for its longtime allies in Ukraine and Europe to help Ukraine persevere against Putin’s aggression.
