Russia's Deathonomics: How War Pay Became the Best-Paying Job in the Country

In Vladimir Putin’s Russia, a dead soldier is worth more than a living one. That is not hyperbole; it is basic economics. A 35-year-old soldier killed in Ukraine can leave his family with as much as 14.5 million rubles — nearly $200,000, more money than most Russians from poor regions could earn in decades.

Applied to the enormous scale of the Russo-Ukrainian war, this grim arithmetic has led economists to coin a term: “deathonomics.” It describes an economy in which dying for the state has become the most reliable path to prosperity for a family. Russian state television has gone so far as to celebrate grieving parents who used their son’s death benefit to buy the white Lada he had always dreamed of, presenting “coffin money” as a heartwarming family story.

Across Russia’s poorest regions, military recruitment offices have become the most dependable source of economic opportunity available. The human cost is staggering. But for now the rubles are flowing, and despite a slowdown in recruitment, men keep signing up.

This is the story of how Putin turned death into both a business model and a military model — and what happens to a country when it begins trading lives for economic stability.

The Price of a Life

To understand how Russia’s military became its most lucrative recruiter, you first have to understand the transformation of the country’s economy that began in 2022 and has accelerated since. When Russian forces invaded Ukraine in early 2022, the plan was to seize major cities, “decapitate” the government in Kyiv, and install one more aligned with Moscow’s interests — all in three days. Things did not go according to plan.

The military was neither prepared nor large enough for a long, sustained conflict, especially given the high casualty rates it was sustaining. General mobilization — essentially forced conscription — was an option, but a dangerous one. The war was relatively unpopular from the start, and Russian officials understood that dragging unwilling men into it could become both a domestic political disaster and an international embarrassment.

The solution was to make military service so lucrative that people would volunteer despite their reservations, even if they knew it might mean their own death.

A Country of Two Economies

Consider Tuva, a mountainous republic on the Mongolian border, where the average monthly salary hovered around 35,000 rubles — just over $400. Tuva is not an isolated case. Much of rural Russia lives on low and stagnant incomes. Across the country’s periphery, from the Caucasus republics to Siberian backwaters, monthly wages rarely exceed 50,000 rubles. Moscow, by contrast, is a city on a hill, where wages average 120,000 rubles a month — nearly three times the national median.

It is into this lopsided landscape that the military steps as an employer. Initial sign-up bonuses, which started at an already generous 195,000 rubles in 2022, more than doubled to 400,000 rubles by mid-2024 — and that is only the central government’s contribution. Regional governments pile on their own incentives, which in certain areas can amount to as much as 5.2 million rubles for a soldier’s first year of service. Even in poorer regions, total sign-up packages now regularly exceed 3 million rubles.

For a young man in Tuva, that single figure can rival a decade or more of factory wages.

When Death Pays Best

Here is where deathonomics truly comes into play. Surviving your contract puts you on better-than-average financial footing. But it is when you don’t come home that the money really starts flowing.

There is nothing unusual about a state looking after the families of soldiers who paid the ultimate price; governments the world over strive to do so. What makes Russia’s case unique is the combination of scale and size — the sheer number of deaths multiplied by enormous individual payouts. Federal death benefits begin at 5 million rubles from the president’s fund. Add roughly 3 million in insurance payouts.

The regional government then chips in another 1 to 3 million. Stack it all together and a dead Russian soldier generates 9 to 11 million rubles for his family. Even at the lower end, that is more than $114,000 — a meaningful sum even in the United States.

In Russia, it can feel like winning the lottery and stumbling onto pirate treasure on the same day. For context, the national median salary is 56,000 rubles a month. In certain republics, a death payout therefore equals more than two decades of average wages, with a great deal left over. The mathematics of desperation drive the system: at current casualty rates, Russia needs about 30,000 new recruits a month — roughly 1,000 to 1,500 volunteers every single day — simply to sustain its operations.

For now, the system has worked. Recruitment offices have seen downturns as the war drags on, but they still enlist enough men each month to keep the machine running. At some point, though, there will simply not be enough people willing to sign up. Some estimates give Moscow about another year before it can no longer sustain these losses, no matter how much money it offers.

The Great Redistribution

Military payouts on this scale have no modern precedent. Together they represent the largest wealth redistribution in post-Soviet history. Yet instead of being achieved through development or reform, the feat has been accomplished through staggering numbers of deaths.

Ironically, on a purely numerical level, this has succeeded where every previous attempt to stimulate Russia’s chronically impoverished peripheries failed. Regions that had never seen serious investment or growth suddenly found themselves awash with military money. The national poverty rate plummeted to 8.5% — the lowest since 1991 — with analysts directly attributing the decline to military compensation lifting some of the country’s poorest families above the poverty line.

In rural Tuva, bank deposits have jumped 151% since the war began. That surge has, in turn, sparked something of a housing boom, with construction crews struggling to keep pace with demand from locals suddenly flush with cash. Families receiving 11 million rubles in death benefits live in regions where the average annual income is a tiny fraction of that figure. For an individual household, it is a financial gamechanger: families move from multigenerational poverty to home ownership, car purchases, and education programs essentially overnight.

This transformation has not been invisible. Military families have become drivers of their local economies, channeling their newfound wealth into theaters, schools, commerce centers, and more. In regions where poverty had been endemic for generations, the money has created something close to a new aristocracy.

The Economic Draft and Its Side Effects

A redistribution of this scale brings costs as well as benefits. Consumer spending has spiked so sharply that some regions are running inflation rates nearly 50% higher than the national average. Traditional industries face labor shortages because the military’s ambition to be the most lucrative employer has worked a little too well. Even for soldiers who survive, military positions pay far better than most civilian jobs, creating a powerful incentive for local men to enlist.

Why toil in a textile factory for 30,000 rubles a month when the army pays five or six times that?

The effects are not theoretical. Entire sectors of the economy have been hollowed out. Mines operate short-staffed because so many workers left for the higher wages of combat. Local small businesses are particularly hard hit, unable to come anywhere close to military pay.

It is worth being precise about how the death benefit functions. It is less a pull incentive luring families to enlist their sons for a payday, and more a dual reassurance: a promise to soldiers that their families will be cared for if they do not come home, and a pacifying effect on local populations who might otherwise be more vocal in their opposition to the war. The benefit buys both bodies and quiet.

How the Kremlin Engineered Consent

The economic transformation did not appear overnight. It evolved out of a series of wartime surprises that at times bordered on political crisis. By September 2022, before the most generous pay and bonuses were in place, the Russian military was running short of men. The war was no closer to ending, casualties were far higher than planned, and the stalemate inspired few new recruits. Something had to change.

On 21 September 2022, Putin signed a decree ordering the first call-up since 1941. It was billed as a “partial mobilization,” limited to 300,000 reservists — largely men who had already been trained and served but had returned to civilian life while remaining on a reserve list. This, Putin declared, was a national emergency.

The reaction was anything but positive. While many reservists obeyed the summons, the rest of the country watched with fear, suspecting that broader conscription might be next. Protests broke out, and so many military-aged men fled that it quickly became an international embarrassment for the Kremlin. Russian agencies reported that roughly 260,000 men left within the first five days alone; independent estimates put the figure as high as 300,000 or even 400,000 by early October.

Surveys found around 70% of Russians feeling fear or alarm about the draft. Whether the Kremlin had planned for any of this may not be known for years, but the panic was heard in Moscow.

Putin’s answer was effective and brutal at once: make the military too lucrative to refuse. Rather than force unwilling, disinterested civilians — who have not historically made good soldiers — into service, the Kremlin sharply increased pay, offered sign-up bonuses, and introduced the now-infamous death benefit. More cynically, it targeted this strategy at the poorest parts of the country, where the financial pull would be strongest. The effect was a self-selection mechanism in which poverty drives enlistment, letting the state claim recruits as “volunteers” while knowing full well their circumstances left them little real choice.

Surgical Inequality

The targeting reveals a surgical precision in its inequality. Republics and regions such as Dagestan and Tuva often meet or exceed their recruitment goals, and Chechnya has even claimed to hit 254% of its target. That inequality then follows recruits onto the battlefield. Men enlisted from Buryatia, for instance, are roughly 75 times more likely to die in Ukraine than a fellow soldier who enlisted from Moscow.

Those drawn from poorer regions are sent to far deadlier front-line conditions, while those from Moscow are kept in comparatively safer postings.

Yet despite this lopsided burden, the Kremlin has been remarkably — and devastatingly — effective at managing public opinion through wealth creation. Geographic insulation helps: the Moscow middle class has remained largely untouched by the war’s first-hand impacts, and the capital is not a heavy recruitment center. Outside the largest cities, the compensation package is generous enough to pacify what could otherwise be widespread outrage at the number of soldiers coming home in caskets. The loss of a child is no less devastating for these families, but they are inherently less likely to protest a government that has financially revolutionized their lives.

Putin has thus achieved something genuinely remarkable: lifting entire regions out of poverty through military compensation. But the success exposes the system’s central limit. The same incentives that transformed these communities also make them dependent on continued conflict. As the pool of prospective recruits shrinks and economic pressures mount, the war machine lurches closer, day by day, to a reckoning.

An Economy Cannibalizing Itself

Three years into what was supposed to be a three-day operation, the bills are coming due in ways the Kremlin never anticipated. The financial burden has reached proportions that dwarf anything seen in Russia since the Soviet collapse.

The numbers describe an economy not in a traditional collapse but caught in a bizarre form of cannibalizing itself. Defense spending has exploded to 6.2% of GDP — the highest since the Cold War, when Russia faced off against far larger adversaries, and nearly triple the NATO average. Military compensation alone eats up roughly $36 billion a year. The federal budget now dedicates 41% of all spending to the military, more than education, healthcare, and social services combined.

This surge has starved civilian sectors of investment. Infrastructure projects have been shelved, civilian manufacturing has declined by 15%, and military production runs at full capacity. Russia is, in effect, eating its own economic future to feed the war machine.

The Iron Lady’s Impossible Job

The woman tasked with managing this economy is Elvira Nabiullina, Russia’s central bank governor. Given the scale of her challenge, she has somewhat ironically earned the nickname Russia’s “iron lady” — an allusion to Margaret Thatcher, who was gifted that title by the Soviet Union for her resolute and uncompromising stances.

When Nabiullina says she will tell you the truth and that it will be unpleasant, she is believed — a rare trait for a public official in Russia. Before the war, she had initially sought to resign over her opposition to the operation and her understanding of its consequences, only for Putin himself to tell her to stay. In a leaked video she described the economic situation as “extreme” and said plainly: “all of us would have wanted for this not to happen.”

Despite her best efforts — including an unprecedented overnight rate hike from 9.5% to 20% immediately after the invasion to stave off a total collapse of the ruble, which was at least partly successful — the structural problems run deeper than the central bank can fix. Oil and gas revenues, long the lifeblood of Russia’s economy, are projected to fall from 11.5 trillion rubles in 2024 to 9.77 trillion by 2027. The reasons vary, but almost all circle back to the war.

Energy Leverage Lost

Russia had long sought to integrate its energy supply into Europe, succeeding through a network of pipelines carrying natural gas to the heart of the continent. The controversial Nord Stream II project, completed but never activated, was first cancelled and later blown up. There is now literally nothing left to sanction even if the West wanted to.

What remains are increasingly unfavorable deals with China and India, where Russia must sell its energy at steep discounts because of the international pariah status it has awarded itself. The country that once held Europe over a barrel now sells to whoever will buy, on terms set by the buyer.

The Sustainability Crisis

At the same time that Russia faces a cash crunch from economic isolation, a more obvious sustainability crisis is raising its head: the recruitment numbers it has sustained over the past three years cannot be maintained permanently. In the third quarter of 2024, recruitment fell somewhere between 40,000 and 80,000 — far below the roughly 90,000 needed to maintain operations. The volunteer pool in the heavily targeted regions is approaching exhaustion, meaning the Kremlin will soon have to face hard decisions about whether it can really “bring the war home” by conscripting men out of the cities.

Demographic trends only deepen the problem. Each death removes not just one soldier but potentially several future ones: people are less likely to volunteer for a war they don’t believe in after watching a brother die, especially once the family is flush with cash. Russia’s military has underperformed throughout the campaign, despite the decade-long modernization Putin convinced the world he had undertaken — and that is unlikely to improve soon.

The first recruits likely signed up through a mix of patriotism and economic interest. But who would have sat out the war for three years and decided only now, in 2025, that this is the cause worth risking their life for?

The answer is economic recruits who care little about the war’s outcome and who increasingly come from troubled backgrounds — criminals offered pardons for their service have become commonplace.

The Trap of Peace

Then there is the question of what to do with these soldiers once the war is over. The economist Andrei Yakovlev captured the dilemma perfectly: “It’d be cheaper to keep all the soldiers on the front line.” His gallows humor points to a genuine problem. Demobilized soldiers will expect to keep their 200,000-plus-ruble salaries. Defense workers will resist returning to civilian wages. Regions dependent on military money face economic collapse without it.

Russia has created a class of soldiers ill-equipped to transition back to civilian life. Millions now depend on the conflict for their livelihoods, and entire regions have restructured their economies around military compensation. Ending the war does not mean peace — it means economic catastrophe for precisely those areas that have sacrificed the most.

Financial analysts suggest Russia can maintain current spending levels for perhaps 12 to 18 months without major new resources or dramatic cuts elsewhere. The logic is circular and self-defeating: the war economy depends on ever-increasing state spending while neglecting civilian sectors, yet continued military spending requires economic growth that itself depends on military expenditure. Putin has built a war economy that needs perpetual conflict to survive but lacks the resources to fight one indefinitely.

A Society Transformed

Behind the fiscal projections lie the human stories of those caught in this strange system. It is easy to lose oneself in statistics, but real people stand behind every figure, and the crisis is best understood through them. The case of Staff Sergeant Alexey Malov stands out in particular.

Malov was a tank commander killed on the third day of the war. Russian state television was eager to depict him as a patriot dying for his country — and there is no reason to doubt that he was. What is notable is how the broadcast portrayed him. Rather than focusing on Malov’s life, the program brought in his parents to explain how they had used his death benefit to buy a brand-new Lada.

“In memory of our son, we bought a nice new car,” his father told the camera. The narrator explained the vehicle “was bought with what people call ‘coffin money,’” noting that “his father says that Alexei dreamt of having a white car, just like this one. Its first trip is to the cemetery.” The 698,000-ruble car represented roughly two years of average wages in their region.

State television presented it as heartwarming — a family fulfilling their dead son’s dreams. There is no reason to doubt the car really was Malov’s dream. But the framing marked the start of something remarkable: the Russian government floating the inherent upside of losing your child in war.

Black Widows and Bureaucratic Cruelty

As compensation payments expanded, so did the opportunities for exploitation. Russian media and officials now document a growing phenomenon they call “black widows” — women who marry soldiers specifically to collect their death benefits. The incentives are substantial: death benefits total 9 to 11 million rubles, while average salaries in peripheral regions hover around 400,000 rubles a year. Those sums represent more than 20 years of normal wages, enough to spawn an underground economy.

The press has taken increasing notice. The blogger Anastasia Kashevarova claimed that “gangs of honey traps were captured in Luhansk,” operating in occupied territories where they seduce soldiers for benefits. “They can pull that scam off repeatedly,” she wrote. At the Center for Support of Combatants and Their Families, staffers report knowing “women who’ve already been married three times — and all three husbands served in the Special Military Operation.”

While some scam the system, families seeking their legitimate benefits after the death of a relative have become entangled in bureaucracy. Early on, the holdups looked like one-off mismanagement. Now it appears Moscow is actively trying to limit the number of claims filed.

Investigative reports suggest that as the death toll mounts and costs spiral, the Defense Ministry has quietly instructed regional offices to scrutinize claims more aggressively, erecting bureaucratic barriers to legitimate compensation. More recently, the military has systematically denied compensation by manipulating death classifications — listing killed soldiers as “missing” rather than dead to avoid paying out.

One such case is that of the Ponomaryovs. Despite being told their son Artyom was killed in Bakhmut, he remains officially listed as “missing” — meaning no body to bury and no compensation to claim. “I’m not doing what I’m doing because of money,” his mother Nadezhda insists. “The most important thing for me now is to find Artyom and know that he isn’t rotting somewhere.”

The bureaucratic cruelty adds insult to mortal injury: families who have already paid the ultimate price must now fight their own government for the compensation that was supposed to justify their sacrifice.

The Reckoning Ahead

Vladimir Putin has achieved something both remarkable and terrible: he has lifted many in his country’s poorer regions out of poverty, but for all the wrong reasons. In this system, every unemployed young man becomes potential military capital, every indebted family a recruitment opportunity, every regional economic crisis a chance to fill the ranks. Putin hasn’t addressed inequality; he has turned it into a resource.

The story of this distorted victory is everywhere. Regions that had never seen serious federal investment suddenly found themselves awash in military money. What thirty years of development programs failed to achieve, war payments accomplished in months. The largest wealth redistribution in post-Soviet history was achieved not through development or reform, but through death.

For three years, this system has kept the war machine running — turning out a seemingly endless supply of Russians to fight and die. But it cannot survive forever. Russia has exhausted the most willing recruitment pools while creating economic dependencies that make peace politically dangerous.

The ultimate tragedy isn’t only the empty cause this war has been fought for. It is that for too many Russians, the devil’s bargain makes perfect sense. In a society with vast numbers of impoverished people on the periphery, the state has finally offered them a leg up — and they may have to pay the ultimate price to take it. In a society that offers its poorest citizens nothing but neglect, the state’s offer to purchase their lives at least acknowledges their existence.

The price might be death, but at least there is a price.

The question isn’t whether this is sustainable — it clearly isn’t. The question is what happens to a society when the bills finally come due: when the coffins stop arriving and with them the checks, when the war economy that promised prosperity delivers only the reckoning that follows. Putin has proven you can indeed put a price on human life. The real cost is what it does to a civilization that learns to accept the transaction.

Frequently Asked Questions

What is “deathonomics”? It is a term economists have coined to describe an economy in which dying for the state has become the most reliable path to prosperity for a family. In Russia’s case, the enormous payouts made to the families of soldiers killed in Ukraine, multiplied by the scale of the casualties, have turned military death into one of the most significant sources of household wealth in the country’s poorest regions.

How much money does a Russian soldier’s death generate for his family? Stacking together federal death benefits (starting at 5 million rubles from the president’s fund), roughly 3 million in insurance payouts, and another 1 to 3 million from the regional government, a dead soldier generates between 9 and 11 million rubles. Even at the lower end, that is more than $114,000 — and in some republics it equals more than two decades of average wages.

Why does the Russian state recruit so heavily from poorer regions? Because the financial pull is strongest where incomes are lowest. By concentrating bonuses and benefits in places like Tuva, Dagestan, and Chechnya — where monthly wages can be as low as 35,000 rubles — the state created a self-selection mechanism in which poverty drives enlistment. This let officials present recruits as “volunteers” while their circumstances left them little real choice, and it kept the war’s burden away from Moscow’s middle class.

What did the September 2022 mobilization change? On 21 September 2022, Putin ordered the first call-up since 1941, a “partial mobilization” of 300,000 reservists. It triggered protests and a mass exodus — as many as 260,000 to 400,000 men left within weeks — and became an international embarrassment. The backlash pushed the Kremlin to abandon forced conscription in favor of making military service so lucrative that men would volunteer.

How has the war money affected ordinary economies in these regions? It has been transformative and destabilizing at once. Bank deposits in Tuva jumped 151%, sparking a housing boom, and the national poverty rate fell to 8.5%, the lowest since 1991. But consumer spending has driven regional inflation as much as 50% above the national average, and traditional industries — mines, factories, small businesses — face severe labor shortages because they cannot match military wages.

Can Russia sustain this system? The video’s clear answer is no. Defense spending has reached 6.2% of GDP and 41% of the federal budget, oil and gas revenues are projected to fall, and recruitment has dropped below the level needed to maintain operations. Financial analysts estimate Russia can hold current spending for perhaps 12 to 18 months without major new resources or deep cuts elsewhere.

Why are some families being denied benefits? As costs spiral, the Defense Ministry has reportedly instructed regional offices to scrutinize claims more aggressively, and the military has manipulated death classifications — listing killed soldiers as “missing” rather than dead to avoid payment. The Ponomaryov family, told their son Artyom died in Bakhmut, still cannot claim compensation because he remains officially “missing,” with no body to bury.

Sources

• RFE/RL: Russia’s war, Ukraine, wages, poverty and prosperity
• Atlantic Council: Can Nord Stream really rise from the dead?
• Wikipedia: Elvira Nabiullina
• Axios: Putin admits mistakes in mobilization
• Wall Street Journal: Russia-Ukraine war military death pay
• Ukrinform: Russian army files most of its KIAs as missing not to pay families compensation
• Re:Russia review
• The Moscow Times: Russian courts processed record 20k cases of missing or dead persons in 2024
• Upstream: German chancellor rules out restart of Nord Stream 2 pipeline
• The Guardian: Russia protests, more than 1,300 arrested at anti-war demonstrations
• Reuters: Russia completes partial mobilisation, defence ministry says
• Institute for the Study of War: Russian force generation and technological adaptations update
• Ukrainska Pravda