History teaches us that wars impoverish nations, exhaust societies, and cause irreparable damage to the social fabric. But Putin’s regime offers an exception—through a model of extensive financing for an ever-growing number of voluntary contract recruits, the Kremlin has established a pathological social engineering system in which the market clearly defines the price of a human life. This price is currently set at 15–17 million rubles (160,000–180,000 euros), which is the total compensation a typical Russian man receives if he voluntarily signs a contract with the Ministry of Defense, goes to the front, and dies there. The authorities do not hold back on cynicism when advertising and recruiting these new soldiers: the billboards across Russia urging men to go to the front explicitly list the total sums, which include the compensation paid to the family in the event of death.
The further away from Moscow you go, the more ads you see. Because there, it is even more evident that the state is selling death to its own people as the only way out of poverty. And doing so successfully, as evidenced by both the monthly numbers of new recruits and thousands of testimonies showing that it was often the wives, mothers, or relatives of the killed soldiers who urged the men to sign the contract and go to the front. The regime, which claims to defend the “traditional family,” is actually destroying it by turning mothers and wives into cold economic calculators who send their husbands to their deaths. Welcome to Russian deathonomics.
Vladislav Inozemtsev, a Russian economist, analyst, and the author of this concept, even calculated that going to the front and dying a year later would be economically more profitable for an average man from the Russian provinces than continuing to live. His expected regular income from working in the private sector over the next 20 years would not exceed the one-time payouts offered by the state for dying on the frontline.
This also holds the answer to the riddle of how much longer Russia will be able to provide a fresh influx of soldiers to the front and, consequently, sustain the war of attrition we are witnessing in Ukraine. Namely, according to fairly reliable estimates, 350,000–400,000 soldiers have already fallen on the Russian side, and to this, one must add two to three times as many wounded or disabled who are no longer fit for active duty. Yet, despite these staggering numbers, the Kremlin has managed to recruit between 30,000 and 40,000 new soldiers per month over the past year—these are precisely the ones willing to die in this senseless war for the price of a luxury car. Given this data, the question of Russia’s ability to secure human resources to continue the war becomes almost rhetorical.
In an interview some time ago, Inozemtsev stated that this market of supply and demand for fresh contract soldiers operates entirely according to the rules of a market economy: as soon as the state detects a slight drop in new recruits, it raises the promised payouts, and an immediate resurgence in demand is observed. Therefore, he estimated that if the state decided to, say, double these payouts to approximately 300,000 euros, a million Russian men would very quickly line up for the front—and consequently, with high probability, for death (or at least disability). What would the army even do with such a mass of people? How would it train and arm them? That, of course, is a completely different question.
But originally, at the start of the Russian aggression, none of this was planned this way, far from it. Modeled on the Crimean operation, the Kremlin envisioned a military and political takeover of Kyiv in February 2022 through a multi-day military operation, a blitzkrieg, which first failed and later (in the summer and autumn of 2022) even devolved into the loss of occupied Ukrainian territories and a retreat from the north and south of the country. At that moment, Putin reacted in a panic and declared a mobilization—despite all PR attempts to sugarcoat the situation (claiming it was only a “partial” mobilization), the fact remains that this happened for only the third time in all of Russian history, including all predecessor state entities going back to the Soviet Union.
And the mobilization, as expected, caused a societal shock and widespread resistance, because the population simply wasn’t prepared for something like this; especially not in urban centers. The Kremlin pulled the handbrake and realized it had to find alternative ways to recruit military forces for the Ukrainian “meat grinder” (the mobilization decree hasn’t actually been revoked since then; it’s just not being implemented).
At first, the paramilitary militia Wagner presented itself as a solution, widely recruiting prisoners and especially members of the social underclass with the authorities’ approval. When this source also dried up, while the political will to subjugate Ukraine did not, the Kremlin needed a new solution. A system that would ensure the successful continuation of the war of attrition while simultaneously operating as if Russia were not at war. One that would somehow numb the social fabric to the point where it would not feel surgical interventions on its living body; so that the average Russian west of the Urals could sleep peacefully, consume, and not think too much about politics, the government, and the war. This exact war, which is of course not a war, but just a “special military operation,” as Putin has called it from the very beginning. In short, not only should the war not “come” too close to Moscow or St. Petersburg in real life—though it nevertheless crept in via drones and attacks on energy infrastructure—but it also shouldn’t intrude into the symbolic, imaginary, and purely intimate space and time.
And the Kremlin wouldn’t be in Russia, the successor to great totalitarian experiments and pogroms against its own population, if it hadn’t invented the system of deathonomics, which primarily appeals to all those living in poverty and at the absolute bottom of society. Those who see absolutely no future in 21st-century Russia, let alone a bright one. Only in this case can such a system work month after month, rather than just as a one-off attempt: it reveals the horrifying scale of people standing in line and calculating whether the moment has come when it pays off more to accept a one-way ticket than to continue merely subsisting at the bottom of society.
Operating this system, it seems the Russian authorities see only one problem: it costs an enormous amount of money. Estimates of the scale of deathonomics hover around 2% of total GDP, or 8–10% of the federal budget annually. And even this wouldn’t be such an issue if so-called petrodollars from the export of black gold continued to flow freely into Russia. But this is where things began to seriously stall in the second half of last year and early this year; global crude oil prices were low (around $55–60 per barrel), the impact of US and G7 sanctions was being felt, and a hole began to grow in the budget which, if this trend continued, would balloon massively by the end of 2026. The Kremlin was already partially preparing for this scenario, as it raised VAT and numerous other taxes for businesses and the population starting in January 2026; but even this probably wouldn’t have been enough, and belts would have had to be tightened even further.
Yet, if just the day before yesterday it seemed that the mathematical unsustainability of deathonomics would financially break the Kremlin, a geopolitical “miracle” occurred in the form of an unexpected savior who ignited a new war. Only Trump, it seems, can save Putin. The war in Iran and the closure of the Strait of Hormuz turned everything upside down: suddenly, the Kremlin received a fresh financial injection it hadn’t counted on. For every $10 increase in the price of a barrel of oil, Russia gets roughly $1.5 billion in additional budget revenues per month (while the revenues of Russian oil companies increase similarly); if average oil prices hover around $100 per barrel, the Russian budget’s additional monthly revenues increase by $6–7 billion thanks to Trump. And directly proportional to this, the Kremlin’s financial capacity to sustain its own deathonomics is preserved.
If Chichikov in Gogol’s “Dead Souls” traded in dead serfs, Putin has upgraded the concept two centuries later with deathonomics. Sadly, not just in a literary work, but in real life. And while the Kremlin calmly trades the living, offering them death as an income and simultaneously as a salvation from a dark future, Gogol is tossing and turning in his grave.