Two and a half years ago, my first article on «deathonomics» appeared in Riddle Russia — that uniquely Putin-era invention which, in 2022−2023, may not have altered the course of the war against Ukraine but certainly transformed its very nature. What began as the Kremlin’s spontaneous response to partial mobilization — offering recruits extraordinarily high salaries by Russian standards, plus massive compensation payments to families in the event of death — quickly became a genuine lifeline for the regime. The war shifted from being a shared national burden to a private matter affecting only a small segment of society. As a result, large swathes of the population stopped perceiving it as a real war at all. That perceptual shift allowed Putin to sustain the conflict without encountering serious domestic pushback.
I define «deathonomics» as a system in which a citizen who enlists, serves, and dies in the war brings his family more money than the average Russian would earn over the rest of his working life — in other words, a system that turns death into the single most economically efficient use of a human life.
Since its emergence, the system has evolved considerably while retaining its core features. The market for hired military labor that developed over this period has gradually erased regional disparities: potential recruits can now move between regions and sign contracts wherever the upfront signing bonuses are highest. Supply and demand have begun to adjust those bonuses in line with the pace of battlefield losses. Yet the system’s fundamental purpose remains unchanged: it enables the Kremlin to avoid launching another wave of full-scale mobilization.
As «deathonomics» has year after year supplied the Russian army with «temporarily living» manpower, the term I coined has gained wider recognition. The French translation économie de la mort appeared just a week after the original Riddle piece, and since the start of this year alone, more than 20 original French-language publications have discussed the concept. The term has been rendered into at least 16 languages, with articles and interviews appearing in the Wall Street Journal, Fortune, Die Zeit, NRC Handelsblad, Il Giornale, and other major outlets.
Today, however, the goal is not merely to recap developments but to examine the mounting problems «deathonomics» creates for Russia — and to assess how sustainable the model really is, especially as rumors of inevitable mobilization have resurfaced in recent months, fueled by reports of unprecedented frontline losses and clearly inadequate recruitment rates.
Before delving into the current challenges, it’s worth highlighting two defining features of the system — one a strength, the other a weakness.
Its key strength lies in its deeply market-driven nature. The federal and regional payments — lump-sum signing bonuses of 1−3 million rubles (depending on the region) plus monthly combat pay of around 200,000 rubles or more — primarily attract those who have failed to find a stable place in the civilian economy: the unemployed, the indebted, those without higher education or family obligations. This is borne out, among other things, by surveys of captured fighters conducted by Ukrainian intelligence. An increasing share of contract soldiers are older men with serious health issues, the jobless, or people under criminal investigation. It is precisely because the dead are drawn overwhelmingly from groups weakly integrated into the productive economy that the model has remained relatively resilient even amid massive casualties (estimates of which range from 200−400 thousand to well over a million).
The «deathonomics» critical weakness stems from its entanglement with the irrational bureaucratic machinery of Putin’s «state.» In the early weeks and months of full-scale war, the «price of life» was calibrated around a contract soldier’s base salary of 35−45 thousand rubles per month and 5 million in death benefits. By 2025, the benchmarks had shifted to monthly pay of 200−215 thousand rubles, signing bonuses of 2−3.5 million, and death payments of 12−16 million — meaning the annual cost of keeping a soldier at the front had roughly quadrupled. Yet, as casualty statistics and countless firsthand accounts confirm, the Russian army has not abandoned its tactics of «meat assaults,» human-wave attacks through minefields and gas pipelines, or the deliberate «zeroing out» of its own troops.
This economically inexplicable phenomenon — in any genuine market system, rising resource costs lead to more efficient use — likely stems not only from the absence of a single «owner» of this human resource but also from a fundamental misalignment of interests between the «suppliers» (the Finance Ministry and regional budgets, which bear most of the expense) and the «consumer» (the Defense Ministry). As a result, skyrocketing costs (federal and regional budgets now spend up to 800 billion rubles annually on signing bonuses alone) exert serious pressure on the economy without prompting any change in combat methods. That disconnect renders the entire arrangement inherently fragile and unstable.
These dynamics point to the fundamental flaw in «deathonomics» rooted in its very origins. The system was never designed to deliver outright military victory in the conventional sense — that would have required far better technical equipment, competent command, and the ability to rapidly scale up troop numbers. Its primary objective was always to sustain the capacity to wage war without generating significant domestic protest potential. On that score, it has succeeded — at least so far.
Yet entering the fifth year of the conflict, the Kremlin now confronts a multifaceted economic and socio-political crisis. Willingness to enlist for what is almost certain death is declining, even as battlefield losses mount. The reasons for the slowdown in recruitment are clear: first, the main pool of 2023−2024 volunteers — those with low economic integration and few prospects — has been largely exhausted; second, nominal household incomes are rising across the board, while military pay is indexed only to official inflation (the gap between average national wages and frontline pay, which was more than threefold in late 2022, has now narrowed to roughly twofold); third, the realization is spreading that the war could drag on indefinitely, with no genuine short-term contracts on offer. Meanwhile, no one in the military hierarchy seems concerned with improving operational efficiency. This inertia is partly a byproduct of «deathonomics» itself: when the supply of manpower appears virtually unlimited, there is little incentive to refine tactics or strategy.
Since the beginning of 2026, virtually every serious analyst has flagged this issue, and even the authorities implicitly acknowledge it. Barring a sudden end to the war (and the Kremlin, judging by its increasingly unrealistic demands and threats to abandon talks altogether, appears disinclined to accept realistic terms), the shrinking flow of contract soldiers can be addressed in only two ways.
The first is a drastic increase in the «price of life.» Earlier analyses (including the report titled «The Price of Life») suggested that near-unlimited volunteer inflows would require raising all payments by 2.5−3 times. This option is clearly under consideration: after a period of stabilization and even slight declines in signing bonuses in 2025, those bonuses have risen sharply in recent months. Sixteen regions have increased them, two of them twice, and Khanty-Mansi Autonomous Okrug set a new record at 4.1 million rubles. Yet the increases have been limited to regional one-time payments; neither the federal signing bonus, monthly combat pay, nor death benefits to families have seen substantial change. The Kremlin apparently still hopes to shift the burden onto regional budgets — many of which are already in dire straits. For meaningful impact, all payments would need to rise by at least 30−60 percent, adding another 2−3 trillion rubles annually to budget expenditures — a step the authorities have so far been unwilling to take.
The second option is a new wave of mobilization. The military continues to lobby for it, but Putin shows little enthusiasm. A possible exception might be targeted call-ups from parts of the active reserve — legislative amendments to enable this have already been passed. Even so, this would not solve the underlying problem. On one hand, a decisive shift on the front would require at least doubling the size of the active army — meaning mobilization of 500,000 to 1 million men. Given the economic and social fallout, such a move looks unfeasible in 2026. On the other hand, mobilized troops would still have to be paid at current rates, so budgetary costs would not decrease.
It is still too early for a final verdict on the system’s performance, but one thing is already clear: «deathonomics» has given the Kremlin the ability to prolong the war without substantial internal resistance. The front line has barely moved in all this time, and prospects for decisive victory remain as distant as ever. The model has accustomed society to war as the new normal and fostered a commercialized «culture of death» — a readiness both to be killed for money and to kill for it. It has also helped project an image of Russia as economically sanction-resistant, prepared to fight almost indefinitely, and indifferent to losses. That image, in turn, has influenced some Western politicians, nudging them to pressure Kyiv into accepting peace on Putin’s terms.
All of this might have laid the groundwork for an entirely new society — one that could serve as a solid foundation for an autarkic totalitarian regime lasting decades. But such an outcome now seems improbable, given Putin’s refusal to «take profits off the table» and settle for quite acceptable peace terms that Russian society itself would likely have endorsed. «Deathonomics» has proved akin to a narcotic: at first it numbs the sense of reality, but over time it blurs the line between desire and actuality altogether.
