Russia’s war in Ukraine is not being fought by a united “multiethnic people,” as Vladimir Putin likes to claim. The enormous burden of the fighting and the death toll has been disproportionately borne by the peoples of the poorest and most remote parts of the country.
New analysis by The Bell shows that the human cost of the invasion falls overwhelmingly on impoverished regions and minorities, and that this burden will only grow as the economy deteriorates.
Since the full-scale invasion in February 2022, the Kremlin has framed the war as a shared national trial. Early on, Putin cited the heroism of Nurmagomed Gadzhimagomedov, a Lak from Dagestan, and other soldiers to say: “I am a Lak, I am Dagestani, I’m Chechen, Ingush, Russian, Tatar, Jewish, Mordvin, Ossetian . . . part of the strong, multiethnic people of Russia.”
An analysis of casualty data collected by BBC Russia and Mediazona tells a different story. The likelihood of dying at the front varies between regions by significant orders of magnitude. The data of almost 170,000 war fatalities is based on public mentions of the deceased, but doesn’t cover all Russian losses.
The state’s decision to focus on the poor and the remote means the human costs of war are lowest in Russia’s wealthy conurbations. Muscovites are relatively the least likely to suffer death — Moscow has the lowest recorded fatality rate at about 0.02% of residents, or 1 in 5,000. St. Petersburg and Chechnya (the fiefdom of Putin’s local strongman Ramzan Kadyrov) follow at 0.03%. In Buryatia, the rate is 0.4% (1 in 250), and in Chukotka and Tuva it reaches 0.5%.
This means that the people of these last-mentioned, unfavored regions are around 25 times more likely to die in combat than Muscovites. Roughly 20 other regions have similarly inflated death tolls.
At first glance, this pattern does not simply track regional wealth, measured as gross regional product per capita. Poor Ingushetia and Karachay-Cherkessia, for example, have casualty levels closer to those of affluent Moscow and St. Petersburg than to those of equally poor Chukotka and Tuva. Neither does it reflect the rises in regional median salaries.
So what’s going on?
Some broad trends help explain the gap:
- Big-city privilege. Residents of major cities and better-off regions are less likely to enlist and, when they do, are better placed to secure safer roles (in say, the missile forces or the navy) thanks to higher incomes and better education. Moscow holds 9.1% of Russia’s population but provides under 5% of new soldiers.
- Ethnic stereotypes. As Maria Vyushkova of the Free Buryatia Foundation notes, high losses in the Arctic and East Siberian regions reflect entrenched stereotypes of indigenous peoples as “natural warriors” and marksmen, and these stereotypes are exploited by recruiters.
The strongest driver, however, is poverty. The Bell finds a clear correlation between regional death rates and the share of people living below the poverty line, around 19,000 rubles, or $250, a month. Some regions now offer sign-up bonuses totaling 2.5m rubles, around 132 times poverty-level income.
This poverty pattern reflects the Kremlin’s recruitment strategy. After the unpopular September 2022 mobilization of 300,000 men, the authorities pivoted to “voluntary” recruitment with high salaries and large one-off bonuses.
Polls suggest that a majority of Russians believe new soldiers are driven mainly by money. Casualty data support this: among voluntary recruits, the worst-hit group is men aged 45–50 — people more likely to be under financial strain. Many regions with high sign-up bonuses, like oil-rich Yugra, are ready to enlist volunteers from neighboring districts, and even reimburse travel expenses.
Regions have a Kremlin-defined quota of contracts to be signed, and some further distort the picture by “poaching” recruits from elsewhere with inflated sign-up payments.
When professional soldiers — who took heavy losses early in the war — are excluded, and the analysis is limited to about 60,000 contract recruits, the link between poverty and casualties becomes even clearer.
Russia’s war is being fought largely by poor people from distant, economically depressed regions, many of them with large ethnic minority populations. The Kremlin appears to be shielding politically sensitive centers such as Moscow, St. Petersburg, and parts of the North Caucasus, the home of an Islamist insurgency in the late 20th and early 21st century, while shifting the human cost to the periphery and using large payouts to do so.
But there are serious flaws in this approach.
Firstly, the sheer numbers. A CSIS report in January estimated Russia has lost up to 325,000 men dead and close to 900,000 wounded, the greatest losses recorded by any major power in any war since World War II. For a country already suffering an acute demographic decline and which has seen perhaps a million emigrate since the war began, this cannot be sustainable, at least in the medium-term.
Secondly, the economic effects are severe. Men fighting at the front cannot work in a domestic economy where growth is stalling and wages stagnating. That means more Russians are pushed into poverty, making military service for money ever more attractive.
This structure of losses is unlikely on its own to trigger systemic collapse. As long as the economy is weak and the war continues, financial incentives will keep drawing in volunteers.
Yet if low growth and high inflation persist, deepening poverty may still push many with few alternatives toward the front — ensuring that the poorest continue to die in disproportionate numbers.
How long Russia can continue to pay this terrible price is the great unknown.
Alexander Kolyandr is a Non-Resident Senior Fellow at the Center for European Policy Analysis (CEPA), specializing in the Russian economy and politics. Previously, he was a journalist for the Wall Street Journal and a banker for Credit Suisse. He was born in Kharkiv, Ukraine, and lives in London.
More on this and other aspects of the Russian economy in a weekly summary produced by the independent publication, The Bell.
Europe’s Edge is CEPA’s online journal covering critical topics on the foreign policy docket across Europe and North America. All opinions expressed on Europe’s Edge are those of the author alone and may not represent those of the institutions they represent or the Center for European Policy Analysis. CEPA maintains a strict intellectual independence policy across all its projects and publications.
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