The crazy sums that the Kremlin offers to volunteers for the Ukrainian front

Six to seven times the median salary for the first year on the front, a bonus for the family in the event of death, and advertisements everywhere in Moscow: the Kremlin is trying by all means to attract new soldiers and send them to Ukraine.

Some people are talking about the “wages of death”. In order to recruit more and more soldiers ready to go to Ukraine, the Russian authorities are offering ever larger sums. The amounts are reaching astronomical levels compared to the average salary. These sums are displayed everywhere in Moscow, on huge billboards, on store doors, in the metro: 5,200,000 rubles. This is what the authorities are offering to volunteers for the first year, which is 52,000 euros, six to seven times the median salary in the Russian capital.

And the authorities are hammering it home in every way, notably in a TV advert which asks: “What are Russian men made of?” First we see rather effeminate men wearing jewelry, drinking cocktails, supposedly representing Westerners. The next image shows a very strong man in uniform who opens a can with his dagger. This is the Russian man. This is the speech – caricature – that we hear all day long today in Russia.

Russian authorities claim that more than 1,000 men enlist every day. It is impossible to know if this is true. But what we can see is that for the moment the Russian army does not seem to be short of men. Despite everything, if salaries have increased very sharply in recent months, we can assume that it is becoming more and more complicated.

Money is a major argument, but it is never something volunteers, like Vladimir, a 45-year-old father seen with his bag, ready to leave, talk about openly outside a Moscow recruitment office. “I’m not here for money, everything is fine for me. This is my homeland, that’s what motivates me. I earn a good living, I’m a plumber, I earn 200,000 rubles a month. The only thing is that my son is 18 and he has two years left before he finishes school. It’s better that I go there than him, right?”

That said, even though he earns a good living, Vladimir will more than double his salary by going to Ukraine. Not to mention that he will no longer pay taxes, the children’s education will be taken care of, as will care for elderly parents, and a job is guaranteed upon return. Never in Russian history have soldiers, who are traditionally poorly paid, earned so much.

Many of these men who enlist come from the poorest regions of Russia, such as Buryatia, far from Moscow, on the border with Mongolia. “Today, the flow of military personnel from Buryatia remains significant because people are attracted by the enlistment bonus of one million rubles, says Alexandra Garmajapova, activist and president of the Free Buryatia movement. It is almost unrealistic to earn so much money in Buryatia, where at the moment there is discussion about how to buy firewood for the winter. A truckload of wood costs 30 000 rubles, an exorbitant sum for the inhabitants of Buryatia. Some take out loans to heat their homes in winter.”

If these men die in combat, the state pays, too: up to 12,000,000 rubles in the event of death, or 120,000 euros. In the poorest regions of Russia, these sums are so large that the Russian economist exiled in the United States, Vladislav Inozemtsev, speaks of a veritable economy of death: “If you calculate all the income of a man at the front, fighting there for a year and his family receives all the bonuses for his death, it turns out that if this man was 35 years old, in 60 regions of Russia his family receives more money than he could have earned until his retirement.”

“In other words, if we put aside the moral aspects, it turns out that going to the front and being killed a year later is more economically profitable than working honestly for several decades.”

Vladislav Inozemtsev, economist

to franceinfo

For the vast majority of economists, Russia can continue to pay these sums for at least several years, and thus finance its war in Ukraine, and avoid having to launch a new mobilization campaign. In particular because the Kremlin remembers that the September 2022 mobilization had caused several hundred thousand men to flee the country.