Russia's Middle-Aged Poor to the Grinder

...these are not the Stark's greybeards...

This opening graphic from the Center for European Policy Analysis (CEPA) report by Alexander Kolyandr from last week, Death Without Glory: Russia’s Message to the Frontline Soldier, tells a story.

The numbers are staggering.

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.

The first thing that came to mind was the low numbers in the VERY ethnic Russian areas, especially around Moscow and St. Petersburg.

Correlation or causation?

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.

And look at which segment of the poor population they are targeting.

…among voluntary recruits, the worst-hit group is men aged 45–50 — people more likely to be under financial strain.

…

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.

Especially when you consider the demographics of Russia that we’ve discussed before—and giving a nod to the well-known ability for Russia to sustain casualties—how much longer can this go on?

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.

Yes, Ukraine has only ~1/4 the population of Russia and similar demographics, but they are fighting an existential war and may be as tenacious as the men of Paraguay when it is all said and done.

I don’t know—but we will find out.

I looked for similar data for Ukraine, but no luck. If you find some, share it in the comments.

What the data we do have show is that Russia will fight Ukraine to its last poverty stricken middle-aged man before pushing the pampered urbanites in Moscow and St. Petersburg—or the flinty TicTok warriors of Chechnya—into the trenches.

Of course, the natural point here is to expect a reprise from the usual suspects, “…but look at what the U.S. did to its minorities and poor in Vietnam…” smear.

Sigh, everyone really should read B.G. Burkett and Glena Whitley’s, Stolen Valor: How the Vietnam Generation Was Robbed of Its Heroes and Its History, but let’s look at it for those who have not.

Here is where the Vietnam War hit the U.S. worst.

Did a disproportionate number of people from high-minority states suffer a disproportionate number of deaths? We know that smear isn’t true by the numbers, but let’s compare graphs.

Let’s look at the percentage of “white” ethnicity in 1970s and see if we can make a connection.

No we did not seem to target minorities. In many ways it seems that if you were from a majority “white” part of the country, you were more likely to get killed in Vietnam.

OK, was it poverty?

If you fought in Vietnam, you likely grew up in the 1950s. What did poverty look like to young people then? Did that connect?

No, that doesn’t seem to fit either, but “white” and poor? Looking at Arkansas and West Virginia…maybe, but I think if you did a proper regression analysis, it wouldn’t quite fit. Indeed, an MIT study saw no connection, with some data suggesting that high income areas suffered higher than average deaths.

I picked the Vietnam War because it was our last war with significant numbers dead.

How about a recent conflict, Afghanistan?

A modern ethnicity map with the percentage of “white” specified.

Again, we are not sending our poor or our minorities to die in disproportionate numbers.

Russia is.

We are not the same.