In recent days, videos of Russian conscripts surrendering to Ukrainian forces in Russia’s Kursk region have been circulating widely on Western social media platforms. Kyiv claims to have already captured hundreds of the conscripts defending the border as its army has advanced deep into Russian territory. For the first time in the war against Ukraine – and for the first time since the Chechen conflict two decades ago – large numbers of Russian conscripts are being tested in battle.
The early evidence suggests that these underequipped and undertrained young men are unwilling to put up a fight in the face of a more experienced opposition. Yet their sudden exposure to front-line warfare may be creating a much bigger problem for Vladimir Putin’s Russia than minor tactical defeats: a large group of vengeful, violent citizens who feel betrayed by today’s leadership.
Every Russian man aged 18-30 is in theory obliged to complete a year’s military service, a system that has existed with minor alterations since the Soviet era. Nonetheless, a social compact is meant to guard the conscript’s life (unlike those of Russia’s professional soldiers, who have died in their thousands since the invasion of Ukraine). Draft dodging is practically an art form in Russia, while exclusions for medical reasons, enrolment in higher education, and a range of other reasons are in place too. If these routes fail to keep the children of worried parents – or would-be conscripts who object for ideological reasons – out of the forces, bribery is a commonplace alternative.
Conscripts do not expect to be engaged in active combat. They typically spend their time engaged in busy work: parade-ground training, administrative duties, tending equipment, or manning distant border posts. Russian law forbids the deployment of conscripts abroad. Putin has repeatedly promised that conscripts would not be called on to fight in Ukraine. The kontraktniki – the contracted soldiers who take up the state’s offers of life-changing sums of money to do the real fighting in Ukraine – the troops who were supposed to be risking their lives. Despite the scale of casualties and the mobilisation of reservists in September 2022, which briefly dented the president’s popularity, conscripts, by contrast, were until a few weeks ago expecting to see out their 12-months’ service in relative safety.
Now, though, with the Kursk incursion, Ukraine has brought the war to Russian soil – and to Putin’s conscripts. Unless Moscow can expel the Ukrainian forces quickly, thousands more might soon see combat. And, exposed to the horror of combat and bristling with fury at the society that sent them into it, many may return to civilian life with a violent grievance.
Russian history shows what happens when the Kremlin sends mentally and militarily unprepared conscripts to war. Forty-five years ago, the Soviet Union invaded Afghanistan. Over the following decade of fighting, what was meant to be an easy victory in a “defensive” war – the comparisons with today’s conflict are all too obvious – turned into a humiliating defeat. Approximately 700,000 soldiers – the majority of them conscripts – were dispatched from across the Soviet Union to fight. Despite the slow progress in the war, they were promised that they would return socialist heroes, just as their fathers had done after the Second World War. According to the state’s propaganda, these young men would occupy positions of power and privilege in return for their sacrifices.
The war, like today’s, was characterised by exceptional, lawless violence and a devastatingly high casualty rate. By the time the last of Moscow’s soldiers limped out of Afghanistan in 1989, 15,000 Soviets were dead. The steady flow of bodies back into towns across the Soviet Union throughout the 1980s played a major role in undermining support for the ailing regime. Groups of soldiers’ mothers took advantage of the freedoms afforded under glasnost to lobby for their sons’ protection. By 1989, few believed in the state’s military mission.
Simultaneously, the promise that these young men would reap the benefits from war was broken. As the fever of social reform swept the new Russian Federation in the 1990s, the afgantsy, as the war’s veterans were known, were forgotten. Lacking trauma care, social benefits, and the respect formerly given to veterans, resentment and anger became the norm. The afgantsy formed “military-patriotic clubs,” where the politics of resentment quickly turned to violent ultra-nationalism. Fanning out across the former Soviet space, they found outlets for violence in wars abroad, in Chechnya – and at home, in the criminal gangs that dominated Russian life in the 1990s.
The listless anger of the afgantsy lingered for years. Under Putin, though, they were soon invited back into the political centre. Newly hailed as heroes, awarded medals at last, and welcomed into the celebration of military masculinity that has characterised the Russian leader’s years in power, the afgantsy are now privileged members of society. On average, these sixty-somethings are likely to be big supporters of the war on Ukraine (indeed, the state has even encouraged them to put their experience as “violence specialists” to use as contract soldiers). But while Putin knows how to use the violent habits of disaffected soldiers to his own advantage, he may be about to create his own breed of disruptive, disaffected afgantsy from the ruins of the war on Ukraine. Given the scale of manpower already deployed in Ukraine – close to half a million Russian troops are currently stationed in the country – the problem might be even greater than that of the 1990s.
Unlike the contract soldiers who choose to fight against Ukraine, the conscripts now thrown into the fighting in Kursk have little to gain from the war. The promises of heroism stemming from sacrifice in the war have been directed at volunteers. Those who have signed up for battle are hailed as heroes everywhere from school classrooms to light-entertainment shows and church pulpits. The conscripts who did not expect to be fighting have been left out of this morale-building work; their eventual return to civilian life might create an intractable problem for Putin, as their sense of betrayal is funnelled into disruption at home.
The state is trying to stay ahead of the problem. On the social media networks popular among young Russians, official outlets, paid influencers and sympathetic patriots are spreading rumours that conscripts at the front could receive increased payouts. Unverified stories of conscripts being saved by experienced Russian troops from encirclement are spreading virally. Meanwhile, videos depicting conscripts as POWs are being removed from Kremlin-controlled networks as fast as they can be uploaded. The bitter pill of unexpected combat is being sweetened.
The state is also trying to show it is actively listening to the concerns of conscripts and their families – unlike in Afghanistan, when young men thousands of miles away from the motherland were cut off from making complaints to the authorities and their loved ones alike. On the popular Telegram and VK social networks, for example, military units create their own feeds and groups where conscripts and their parents can find their questions about conditions answered (albeit perhaps not entirely truthfully) and like-minded citizens to share their concerns with (albeit in a space that the authorities can monitor).
Indeed, the state’s attempts to ensure that the gradual resentment of Afghanistan, and the Chechen wars that followed, is not repeated have also led to the creation of a range of fake support groups for soldiers’ mothers. The Russian Council-Committee of Soldiers’ Mothers, which has 120,000 followers on the popular VK platform, was – as conscripts were surrendering to Ukrainian forces – celebrating national “Officers’ Day,” spreading a fake news story about Volodymyr Zelensky planning to flee Ukraine, and sharing information about front-line bonuses. Dedicated spaces allow mothers and wives to pose questions. It appears to be led by two ordinary Russian women.
Despite appearances, the state is not listening to its soldiers. The group is a product of the Kremlin, designed to allay fears about the fate of both kontraktniki and conscripts: its address is even listed as “1, Red Square” and it has only existed for a few years. Nonetheless, a worried Russian soldier or mother might be forgiven for confusing the group with the almost identically named Committee of Soldiers’ Mothers of Russia, an NGO that has been supporting soldiers since 1989 but whose work has been limited by government threats.
Numerous fake support groups exist, each an attempt to demonstrate that the state is listening. The media publishes stories promising that state officials are looking into the disappearance of conscripts during the war. When Putin met with a group of soldiers’ mothers at the Kremlin in November 2022, he claimed that “unity is the most important key to our success”. Yet now that his regime’s promises to keep conscripts away from war have been broken, unity may be difficult to maintain.
The Kremlin’s response amounts to little more than a flimsy PR strategy. Its facade of Potemkin support for young conscripts engulfed in the violence – in reality, Putin’s regime will not pay them large bonuses, it is not listening to their families, and it is not providing psychological care to those returning from the front – may leave the president in a nightmare scenario.
In a country in which returning troops committing violence is becoming common, betrayed conscripts may follow not in the footsteps of the heroes they see in the state’s movies about the Second World War, but in those of the Afghanistan generation. If the state does not respond to their concerns, and if the wider public at some point in the future tries to forget Russia’s brutal war on Ukraine, these men may find themselves on the periphery of society. If so, their experiences of betrayal and disappointment may lead them to bring yet more violence to the Russian Federation – and to threaten the national stability that Vladimir Putin has long made the foundation of his rule.
[See also: Who’s winning now?]
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This article appears in the 28 Aug 2024 issue of the New Statesman, Trump in turmoil