Russians are finally losing their appetite for a quick death in Ukraine.
Military bloggers and ordinary soldiers have increasingly been posting detailed videos of the horrific conditions on the front. Personnel changes in Russia’s Ministry of Defense also hint at official recognition that something isn’t going quite as Kremlin propaganda insists it is.
But the most persuasive evidence of growing Russian dissatisfaction with the war is a billboard that just recently appeared in St. Petersburg. “In the Hero-City,” says the ad, “there are its own heroes.” Log in to a government website or dial 117, sign up for the army — and get a whopping 1.3 million ruble payment, equivalent to what an average Russian earns in a year.
But what’s particularly important about this offer is that the billboard appeared in Russia’s second city, which, like Moscow, has been mostly spared the sight of coffins and prostheses. Those horrors have been overwhelmingly concentrated in Russia’s impoverished non-Russian provinces, where 1.3 million rubles amounts to several years of wages. In breaking its own taboo, the Kremlin is obviously desperate for recruits.
Even more important, two years ago Russians were offered 200,000 rubles for signing up. The price of a new recruit has gone up by 650 percent! Even accounting for inflation, that’s a huge rise, testifying to the fact that demand for soldiers is high and supply is low. Under such market conditions, prices go through the roof.
In other words, Russians are increasingly unwilling to serve and are thereby depressing supply, while the manpower deficit on the battlefield is growing and is thereby increasing demand. With over 535,000 dead and wounded, and well over 1,000 daily casualties, it’s about time for Russians to have realized that the regime is using them as cannon fodder.
This mood swing bodes ill for the regime and Russian President Vladimir Putin. Their working assumption, like that of too many Western policymakers and analysts, has been that Russians are gluttons for punishment; that they’ll march blindly to their deaths like sheep to slaughter. Enthusiasm for the war may have been high in the months after the invasion, when it looked like Russia would steamroll across Ukraine. But it could only have dwindled in the aftermath of Russia’s humiliating withdrawal from Kyiv, Sumy, Chernihiv, Kharkiv and Kherson provinces a few months later.
Since mid-2023, the front has barely moved in either direction, while Russian casualties have nearly doubled, from about 600-800 per day to at least 1,200-1,400. Putin is obviously happy to exchange Russian lives for a few square miles of Ukrainian mud, but Russians seem to finally be waking up and expressing their opposition to pointless death.
We know that Russian soldiers have been defecting and surrendering. Might flight from the front soon reach a tipping point and become more sensible than sitting in a rat-infested trench and waiting to be killed? Might Yevgeny Prigozhin’s attempted coup in June 2023 be a foretaste of things to come?
History is full of examples of soldiers mutinying, fleeing or turning against their commanders when conditions on the front became intolerable and the chance of being executed for insubordination or desertion appeared less than the chance of being killed by the enemy.
The Romans dealt with insubordination by decimating — that is, killing one-tenth of — the affected ranks. During World War I, more than 700,000 German soldiers deserted. In 1917, thousands of French soldiers mutinied. Hundreds of thousands of Russian soldiers fled the front in 1916-1918, thereby accelerating peasant land seizures and popular appetite for revolution. At the beginning of Hitler’s invasion of the Soviet Union in June 1941, several hundred thousand Soviet soldiers chose surrender over death. In the Vietnam War, American soldiers expressed their discontent by “fragging” their superiors.
Note that, in the 20th century, Russians have been especially prone to run. Hence the claim that Russians are culturally preprogrammed to submit to commands is as wrong as the claim that Russians don’t rebel. They do, of course, and there is no reason to suppose they won’t against the bloodthirsty Putin regime.
Putin and his comrades face a no-win situation. If they stop mobilizing soldiers for the front, they can’t possibly tip the scales and defeat Ukraine. Indeed, they’ll lose. But if they forcibly mobilize soldiers, they will only increase the incentives for deserting, thereby undermining the war effort.
We don’t know when the tipping point for rational flight will be reached, but we can hazard two guesses.
First, Russians will be more likely to refuse to fight the longer the war continues. As the supply of volunteers dries up and forcible mobilization proves counterproductive, conditions for the overtaxed front soldiers will become intolerable. Time is anything but on Putin’s side.
And second, if Russia suffers a major defeat, soldiers are likely to save their skins by jumping ship. Such a defeat could be anything from a Ukrainian march on Moscow (highly improbable) to another forced withdrawal from some of the occupied territory (perfectly plausible). Losing all or part of Crimea would be especially demoralizing.
The moral for Ukraine and its allies is simple: Hang in there. The Russians expected to do the dying are refusing to die.
Alexander J. Motyl is a professor of political science at Rutgers University-Newark. A specialist on Ukraine, Russia and the USSR, and on nationalism, revolutions, empires and theory, he is the author of 10 books of nonfiction, as well as “Imperial Ends: The Decay, Collapse, and Revival of Empires” and “Why Empires Reemerge: Imperial Collapse and Imperial Revival in Comparative Perspective.”