Warfighters Are Not Always Who You Think They Are
In Russia, as in much of the world, it’s disproportionately the poor and/or rural who fight and die
An article today (March 30) in The Guardian newspaper confirms what I’ve long thought about the raw recruits and “conscripts” who serve in many armies around the world. Titled “Coffins in Buryatia: Ukraine invasion takes a toll on Russia’s remote regions,” it chronicles the short lives and needless deaths of four young men from the far Eastern region of Russia who were killed in the early days of fighting in Ukraine. The accompanying photo shows the modest circumstances of this far-away community, itself an artifact of the past “Russian Empire,” as a handful of mourners stand by an open coffin that rests on a simple table, something that looks oddly like a folding banquet table or a gurney but without any cloth covering or adornment of any kind. The wall behind the mourners seems to be made entirely of unfinished plywood; the venue itself might be a gymnasium, or a warehouse. There are a couple of soldiers in uniform as well as several Buddhist monks also in attendance. The whole scene speaks of remoteness and poverty.
“He just didn’t want to let his team down. He felt it was his duty to go,” the mother of one of the young men killed said after the modest ceremony. “Our family opinion on this differs from the one held by authorities, but what can we do?”
Separately, an interview published earlier this week in DW (Deutsche Welle, the German radio network’s online site), features a Russian mother who was lied to about where her son was being sent, then lied to about where her son died (inside Russia? From a Ukrainian invasion? Everything was a misdirection play from her government). She is cautious in condemning the war, only going so far as to say she knows the “special military operation” really is an all-out war, which she called a “bloodbath.”
“The last time I heard from him was on the morning of February 24, when everything started,” the mother is quoted as saying. “He wrote to me using a fellow soldier's WhatsApp account, telling me: "Mum, war has broken out." And I replied: "My son, I can see it on television." And he said: "Can you imagine, an entire unit with our boys was killed at the border." I asked: "Where are you?" To which he replied: "I am in Smolensk, mum."
This young man, identified only as Yevgeny (not his real name; changed to protect the family, according to DW), had joined the Army as a teen, then worked as a security guard for a time before reenlisting. Prior to being sent to his death, Yevgeny’s role was to disband protests in Moscow, according to his mother. He had not seen combat before the invasion of Ukraine. His mother said he wanted to complete his assignment in this “special military operation” in part because he wanted to be with his team – just like the young man from Buryatia in the Far East of Russia. That’s another way earnest young men get manipulated by their regimes – maybe they don’t really believe the propaganda about neo-Nazis or security threats or Mother Russia (or “Rule Britannia,” or “Let Freedom Ring” or whatever) but they don’t want to let their comrades down.
I don’t have socioeconomic data about who serves in the Russian military but I know that one of the reasons the former Soviet Red Army had to pull out of its disastrous turn in Afghanistan in the 1980s was the significant and public pushback from mothers who were losing their sons in that war. There certainly weren’t many families of leading Communist Party members or other elites involved. Later, Russian leaders boasted that they no longer would rely on conscripts to fill roles in their militaries, but only volunteers who wanted to be soldiers, though that seems only to be partly true today.
Some socioeconomic data are available about our military, of course, some of which I’ll share below. Surprisingly (to me, at least) is the fact that most recruits do not come from the poorest sectors of our economy (in contrast to a point often made by critics). In fact, the middle income levels are somewhat over-represented while the both the lowest and highest “quintiles” are somewhat underrepresented. Nonetheless, I do want to remind you of a remark about our misadventures in Iraq and Afghanistan that I’m sure you’ve heard before – the dead come from places you’ve never heard of before, namely small towns with little opportunity such that a career in the military was seen as attractive, a way out of town if nothing else. (There is an officer corps that often comes from multi-generational military families, often from The South, but also that mimics a kind of executive career path.) The recruits are more likely to have come come from places you’ve never heard of before, places where apparently they’re not necessarily impoverished but where opportunities are low. Our own Buryatia, you might say. A close look at the data below (in the link provided) does support this perception - recruits from several Southern and Upper Midwest and Mountain states (which have low density) are over-represented as a proportion of their young people aged 18-24.
Now, for my source of data on our soldiers, from The Council on Foreign Relations, from 2020. Note that the data does not separate combat units from non-combat units – this is a major distinction often ignored, i.e., who’s really putting their lives on the line. For more on that, please see my Substack from August 29 of last year, “White, Christian and Dead.” It can be found in the Archives is the link doesn’t work.