Members of non-Russian minorities are fighting for Putin in the Ukraine war. Apparently, a particularly large number of them are dying – far more than, for example, Russian fighters from Moscow or St. Petersburg. Why is that?
Putin is deliberately sending poor members of non-Russian minorities to the war in Ukraine. This is a rough finding of examining verified fallen soldiers from Russia. It is rightly pointed out that the death rate among non-Russian minorities is many times higher than among ethnic Russians.
But how is that justified? As in other countries, the Russian armed forces are a career perspective, especially for socially disadvantaged and often unemployed young men. Working as a professional soldier (kontraktnik) helps with social advancement.
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The army is therefore an attractive employer, especially in poorer regions where the average wage is significantly lower than the national average. The pay for the professional soldiers is significantly higher than the general average wage.
The Russian armed forces therefore attract poor, younger men. In the high-income regions, above all in Moscow or St. Petersburg, this motive for entering the army by contract does not exist or only rarely.
So it is probably young men from economically structurally weak regions who make up a disproportionate share of Russian career soldiers. However, it must be admitted that we do not have reliable data on the ethnic and social composition of the Russian army. This is considered a state secret in Russia.
Of course, ethnic Russians (79.8 percent of the Russian population) still make up the dominant proportion of professional soldiers; this dominance is probably even more pronounced in the officer corps.
Gerhard Mangott is a professor of political science with a special focus on international relations and security in the post-Soviet space. He teaches at the Institute for Political Science in Innsbruck and is a lecturer at the Diplomatic Academy in Vienna
Poverty and non-Russian nationality often, but not always, go hand in hand. Men from poor North Caucasian Dagestan, from the Siberian regions of Tuva and Buryatia are therefore also the largest group of Russian soldiers who died in Ukraine.
Dagestan has the highest casualty rate. There are also high casualty figures in the ethnically Russian-dominated region of Astrakhan; there it is a disproportionate number of soldiers of Kazakh nationality who lose their lives.
Of the dead that were verified at the end of July – that was 5,185 soldiers – only 11 came from Moscow and only 35 from St. Petersburg. There are no sons of the elite. On the other hand, there are verified 257 dead from Dagestan and 223 from Buryatia.
Another factor to note in relation to the number of casualties is the higher birth rate among many non-Russian minorities – especially among Muslim minorities. As a result, the number of potential recruits is also higher than in the Slavic population of Russia, which is characterized by low birth rates.
However, it would be wrong to claim that members of many, small minority peoples only have such high casualty rates in the Ukraine war because of poverty.
Ethnic Russian chauvinism and a certain contempt for some ethnic minorities is also the reason why minorities in particular are increasingly being sent to the front lines of the war of attrition in eastern Ukraine.
Poor minorities are not only disproportionately victims because of the higher attractiveness of serving as a career soldier due to poverty. They are also because they are used in riskier military maneuvers. According to unconfirmed information, the soldiers from ethnic minorities are also deployed in the highly endangered infantry of the Russian army.
Another reason is that soldiers from regions far from Ukraine are preferred by commanders to be sent there because there are far fewer family ties than between ethnic Russians and ethnic Ukrainians.
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But there is another reason why the number of casualties in the Russian metropolises, especially in Moscow and Petersburg, is noticeably low. The large Russian cities have the largest proportion of citizens who are critical of the regime and who can be mobilized for demonstrations and resistance.
The Russian leadership fears that high death rates among recruits from these cities could trigger protests and increase pressure on the government. Poor dies quietly, middle class dies louder.
This applies in principle, even if there have been local protests in some non-Russian-dominated regions against the high number of dead. The organization “Asiatics of Russia”, which is fundamentally committed to supporting minority groups, is staging small demonstrations against the ethnically distorted deployment of Russian soldiers in the Ukraine war. Ultimately, however, these local protests remain insignificant for the stability of the regime in Russia.
Due to all of the above factors, casualty rates will continue to be disproportionately high among many ethnic minorities. Some observers speak of a “racist army”. This is probably an exaggeration, but poverty and ethnic minority status cannot be denied as important factors in the victims of the war.
