Set in a fictional region of northwestern Russia in a time roughly contemporary to ours, players step into the shoes of a former private military contractor1 abandoned in the region as it descends into lawlessness following an undisclosed disaster. Players fight against computer controlled scavengers and other players to gather loot and survive. It is known for being the “Dark Souls” of first person shooters due to its extreme difficulty and pioneered the subgenre now known as the extraction shooter.

This article is not about the merits of Escape From Tarkov as a game, any of its design principles, or its influence on the gaming industry.

This article is about Battlestate Games and their connections to groups and businesses actively participating in the Russian invasion of Ukraine as well as their continued operation within Russia itself after 2014 and 2022.

They picked London for the Weather

A visit to Battlestate Games’ website reveals very little. A concise description of what the company specializes in, their flagship project in Escape from Tarkov, a link to a trailer for the game, and a contact panel.

At the bottom of the website we can find “BATTLESTATE GAMES LIMITED.”

This is a company registered in London, UK whose office address is a coworking space. We can also find that the company is registered to a Ludmila Lipskaya, whose correspondence address is another coworking space in London.

Ludmila Lipskaya2 is not the head of Battlestate Games.

The head of BSG is Nikita Buyanov. Numerous interviews have been conducted with him detailing how Escape from Tarkov is his project3 and his social media accounts openly disclose that he is the COO.

However, from a look at their annual financial statements, we can find a “Nikita Buianov”4 owed compensation for services rendered.5

This is also not a case of a Russian company operating outside of Russia with a physical office in somewhere like Cyprus or Armenia to attract international talent. Battlestate Games has a physical office in St. Petersburg, Russia that they are relatively open about.6

This can be evidenced by previous job postings on the Battlestategames.com website.

The posting specifically notes the applicant can “take part in the creation of one of the best PC games developed in the CIS,7” a physical office in the center of St. Petersburg, and assistance in relocating from another region.

Given that Battlestate Games Limited was incorporated in 2016 (despite having been in development as early as 2012) which predates the SWIFT ban against Russian banks following the full scale invasion of Ukraine but well after the Russian annexation of Crimea, a charitable read of this would be to make their product maximally palatable to westerners who would otherwise be uncomfortable paying a Russian company through Russian payment processors.

This is not the case.

Posting Through It

In February of 2016, Battlestate Games posted a short promotional video in which they visited Lobaev Arms, a Russian manufacturer of precision rifles, to take high resolution photos of their weapons to add to Escape from Tarkov and shoot some guns.

This video has been made private but the embed still appears on the Escape from Tarkov website, the title of the video can be seen at the top of the page, and you can still select the previous or next developer diary. However, a wayback machine capture as recently as April 2024 contains access to the video in question in which we can find this:

The flag in the background is a flag of the so-called Donetsk People’s Republic.

Lobaev Arms does have connections to the Russian invasion of Ukraine as the company and its owner, Vladislav Lobaev, were sanctioned by the U.S. Government on February 23, 2024.

It is worth noting that Escape from Tarkov features a large assortment of meticulously reproduced guns, gun accessories, and various forms of tactical gear bearing their real life names and while this does include a large number of Western manufacturers8 like Colt, Sig Sauer, Highcom, or Crye Precision, it also includes Russian companies like the aforementioned Lobaev Arms as well as giants like Kalashnikov Concern.

Battlestate Games’ possession of licenses for these products has always been in question, simply due to the sheer number of companies who they would need to acquire licensing agreements with.

I am not familiar with Russian media licensing law but in the West, games being delisted due to the expiration of licenses is an unfortunately common occurrence. Escape from Tarkov being commercially available for almost 10 years and not suffering from any revisions to equipment names would require extremely generous and permissive licensing agreements from the companies in question. For these companies, it is very likely they are not licensing designs and simply adding them to the game because they can.9

However, for the Russian companies it is very likely there is some kind of agreement in place rather than copyright infringement. As with Lobaev Arms, Battlestate Games has posted and removed a video in which they visit Kalashnikov Concern.10 Kalashnikov was sanctioned by the US in 2014.

While not featuring in a promotional video, another firearm, the ORSIS T-5000 appears in Escape from Tarkov under that name. ORSIS is the trading name of Promtekhnologiya who were sanctioned by the US government in May of 2022. ORSIS is a manufacturer of precision rifles and the sanctions notice explicitly states that they supply weapons to the Russian military and intelligence services. ORSIS was also involved in a 2023 sanction busting operation to procure Hornady .338 ammunition for Wagner Group.

All of this could be explained by the developers being stuck between a rock and a hard place where they’re too afraid to voice opposition to the war and they’re just a bunch of gun nerds who aren’t into politics. They didn’t know what that flag was and how can you make a modern shooter set in Russia without AKs? They had to work with Kalashnikov. And when the full scale invasion started they tried to keep their heads down and distance themselves from everything.

This is yet again, not the case.

The following image is part of a teaser posted to Twitter in December 2022 for Escape from Tarkov: Arena.11

Due to the proliferation of multicam camouflage variants on the battlefield, the Armed Forces of Ukraine make frequent use of blue or yellow armbands (usually made of tape) as a form of identification, friend or foe (IFF) during combat operations.

One may argue that the yellow armband there is just coincidence but the character being given the middle finger in this promotional image is an extremely close recreation of the typical look of Ukrainian soldiers who fought in the earliest stages of the Russian invasion of Ukraine dating back to 2014.

Yellow armbands and PASGT helmets (often being black due to lacking helmet covers) were ubiquitous amongst Ukrainian soldiers and volunteers12 from the earliest stages of the Russian invasion.13 The use of yellow armbands was so common amongst Ukrainian troops that in the earliest stages of the full-scale invasion, Ukrainian forces made a deliberate shift toward blue armbands as Russian saboteurs were attempting infiltration by wearing yellow armbands of their own.

Worthy of note is the fact that Escape from Tarkov: Arena does use armbands for IFF but it only uses the typical video game colors of red and blue. Yellow armbands are not present in any Escape from Tarkov: Arena gamemode14 nor do they appear as an accessibility option for colorblind players.15

Some might argue that the choice of equipment is just a coincidence16 but a look through the rest of their promotional images typically showcases the contemporary “operator” look of a high cut helmet or just a balaclava and a minimalist plate carrier leaving the guy with 90s surplus as a bit of a standout.

This is a dogwhistle and very obviously one in the context of how they are aware that they have concrete connections to companies involved in the Russian war effort and have taken steps to obfuscate them.

This is not the full extent of connections Battlestate Games has to groups actively involved in the Russian invasion of Ukraine17 but at this point it should be obvious that there is enough circumstantial evidence that it ceases to be circumstance.

I’ve devoted a lot of time here to demonstrating that the developers very likely do support the Russian invasion of Ukraine but ultimately the most important aspect of why you should not purchase this game is their simple act of their continued operation within Russia.

In 2025, that has serious implications as unless they’re committing legendary acts of brazen tax evasion, they are surely paying taxes to the Russian state which is spending approximately 7.2% of their GDP, 15.5 trillion roubles, on the invasion of Ukraine in 2025 alone.

I won’t tell you how to spend your money but you should be aware of who and what it is going to.

The term I like to use is “cool boys2 with cool toys” because the operator, with millions of dollars and thousands of hours of training poured into their career, is afforded a leeway in equipment quality and choice that most other soldiers do not have. The operator is distinguished from the “regular” infantry by the finest force multiplying doohickeys Uncle Sam’s taxpayers can buy and many come to believe that those doohickeys are the force, not the multiplier.

This is in turn perpetuated by the depiction of special forces in popular culture and the eager embrace of that depiction by the subjects themselves. There is an enormous industry of veteran podcasts that serve as a news-entertainment hybrid3 for many American men with many hosting their own shows or appearing as guests on the shows of other content creators. Here they present themselves as an authoritative source on war and conflict as well as how to go about doing it despite many of them never actually having a hand in strategy.4

There are countless books, movies, TV shows, comics, and video games depicting special forces operators as badasses who are the only men available who can solve a serious problem with their intense training and warrior ethos being what makes them a cut above the “regular” soldier. This coexists alongside a massive industry of “tactical” products, experiences, and parasocial relationships marketed by these men. Navy SEALs are the most egregious example of this phenomenon with SEAL guides to fitness, diet, and even parenting. SEALs endorsed workout equipment and even charged inflated prices for executive team-building camps.5

The emergence of this phenomenon can be traced back to the Great Male Renunciation.

For those unfamiliar, the Great Male Renunciation is the historical phenomenon that took place at the end of the 18th century where men effectively renounced their claim to being beautiful. They did away with flamboyant colors and elaborate dress6 and replaced it with solid, darker colors, and what would eventually become the suit that every male world leader or societal elite is expected to wear.

The Great Male Renunciation deprived men of the means to peacock for other men.

The Cult of the Operator and all of the aesthetics of violence it entails are a vehicle for men to “prove” how they are more masculine than their peers through the purchase of equipment they affiliate with elite military formations. It is a cargo cult of masculinity.

Obviously the phenomenon of men wanting to impress other men with material possessions extends to numerous other consumer goods7 but the primary salesmen of this form of masculinity being men whose professional reputation is built around a mythos of peak masculinity cannot be overlooked.

These men present themselves as the preeminent example of manhood and sell a performance of masculinity and an aura of violence to other, more insecure men. A quick visit to “guntube8” or military tactical gear communities will present you with a myriad of customized weapons or pieces of load bearing equipment meant to resemble those seen in photos of real soldiers in real warzones. Manufacturers are more than happy to oblige these desires and make advertisements with veteran special forces operators describing their equipment setups and handy links for you to buy it from them.9

Going to war is scary and dangerous so clearly the next best thing is to listen to the guy who did. Buy yourself some $300 pants in multicam “stop resisting”10 and the gun doohickeys he has a sponsorship for so you can play operator on a flat range and get some pictures to show off around the water cooler because you want to make Jerry from sales look like a nerd.

At first glance this appears to be another abstract gender theory thing but it does materially manifest itself into domestic policy.

The militarization of American law enforcement is a long observed phenomenon but it is worth noting that this is aesthetic militarization rather than institutional militarization.

Domestic law enforcement officers are civilians, many of them have less training than soldiers and far less than the special forces operators they idolize. Their institutions do not enforce rigid discipline and oversight nor do they cultivate a culture of duty over self. Yet they are showered in military equipment provided by the Department of Defense and paid for by local taxpayers.11 Police departments even use this as an incentive with an Oregon State Police SWAT team recruitment email presenting images of men in plate carriers aiming rifles under night vision while asking “are you jonesing to fire less lethal rounds and gas canisters?”

As of very recently, American law enforcement have also seen themselves tapped to carry out the Trump administration’s illegal deportation orders. They are deployed to American cities while outfitted in the full panoply of war as if they were occupying Baghdad to round up line cooks. The appearance of these law enforcement officers as elite special forces is intentional, both because they are pretending to be soldiers, and because they believe the people who come to oppose them will see them as the unstoppable warriors depicted in movies and video games.

They want to achieve violence by having crowds perceive violence.

Maybe making Jerry from sales look like a nerd isn’t enough.

If that’s the case you can take it one step further and become a cop. They won’t send you overseas, you’ll never get shelled, and you can stay at home and play with all these cool toys that Jerry can’t own because he’s a civilian. You can be a manly man who carries a gun and fights crime.

You can convince yourself that if the time comes, you’ll be a hero. You have none of the training but you have all of these talismans and surely they will grant you bravery and skill in battle as though you were a heroic warrior of yore.

It won’t.

You tell yourself that you’re going to outlast them, that if you leave they’ll just replace you with a toady that will do their bidding. You tell yourself that you’ll stand up when it matters.

But you’re not the only one. There’s dozens, hundreds, maybe thousands of you still toiling away. And while it’s business as usual for you, things start to change. Sometimes it’s subtle, sometimes it’s not. But it doesn’t directly impact you or what you’re doing so you keep at it.

Why should you care about being told to pull pronouns from your email signature? You didn’t even have an email signature.

But then it’ll end up in front of you. You’ll realize exactly what they want you to do. What they expect you to do. No one else stood up. Why would you?

You may not have done anything you personally found objectionable but you contributed to making this machine function. You helped bring this machine to the place it is right now.

You are complicit in this.

All those things you thought believed in, all of those principles you thought you had, you threw them away without even realizing it. You prostituted yourself for $25 an hour and convinced yourself it was in service of the republic.

Your boss tells you that you should ignore what all the other people are saying, they don’t know what we do here. You’re here to serve the American people and you should be proud of that.

You should be proud of how the department you’re part of, the department you make function on a day to day basis, is dedicated to using the full force of the US government to humiliate trans people and they expect you to help them do it. They expect you to send them letters saying they can’t be who they are because it “promotes an extremist ideology.” They expect you to be a cold and ruthless bureaucrat who says to their face that the person they are is an affront to nature.

If you have any kind of shame how do you look your friends and family in the eye after this? The people who trusted you. The people who thought they knew you.

They were wrong. They never should have been so foolish to trust you.

You told yourself you’d throw your body on the gears to make it stop but all you did was ensure the machine kept running.

You’re nothing better than a collaborator.

In the contemporary usage this does genuinely describe a very large swath of Russian society. They may not be rabidly jingoistic but Russians are largely supportive of the invasion of Ukraine because it has personally impacted them minimally, I have previously discussed this at length in the context of Russian mobilization.

This is an imperial mindset. The war is “over there” and it’s not their problem and when the war does come home in the form of casualties or the occasional drone flyby, it’s an annoyance and an inconvenient reminder that those pesky little people have the audacity to resist and they could just become subjects and end all of their suffering and make this inconvenience go away.

This may seem very far away even with America’s new administration but Trump 2.0 wasted no time in engaging in delusions of imperial grandeur with his inaugural address referring to taking back the Panama Canal and explicitly using the phrase “manifest destiny.”

The administration has also discussed taking Greenland, military operations in Mexico (with the 82nd Airborne beginning preparations to deploy to the Southern border today) or annexing the entirety of Canada.1 As of recently, it has been reported that the Danish prime minister had a phone call with Donald Trump and Trump was very serious in his intention to take Greenland such that it has shaken many European leaders. Mexico, who has found itself in the crosshairs of the Trump administration over immigration and a completely fucking stupid idea that drug cartels can be dismantled by “doing a Sicario” refused to accept a US deportation flight earlier today. Canada, in response to rumblings of the Trump administration implementing tariffs2 with one of our closest trading partners, has signaled willingness to engage in retaliatory tariffs.

The last of those brings me to why I am absolutely losing it on my fellow countrymen.

The response of many Americans to the idea that Canada could retaliate with tariffs of their own is confused shock. As this thread on Bluesky from Sharon Kuruvilla demonstrates, the response of most Americans to the idea that someone might fight back is slack-jawed bewilderment that other people might want to see them suffer as we will make them.

I understand that this is Tiktok but this is genuinely how many Americans view other countries inconveniencing us by responding to our own actions. (Trade) War is something that happens over there, it doesn’t impact us beyond occasionally someone from your high school coming home in a casket draped with a flag, but for the people that we bring war to, it is unimaginable pain and suffering that Americans have never experienced firsthand.

Americans and Russians are really not so different in this aspect. We are both content to let the imperial wars we wage fade into background noise while we kill people over there. We did this with Iraq and Afghanistan. The Russians did it with Crimea and the War in Donbas and they’d like to keep doing it but tenacious Ukrainian defense that extracts a tremendous toll of blood and a strategic bombing campaign that makes it impossible.

A common retort from Americans is “I didn’t vote for him, why should I suffer?” and this is an abdication of collective responsibility.

We might be a lot like Russians but America is not Russia. We have free elections, we have freedom of speech, we have freedom of assembly. We do not have a state security service that targets dissidents as the Russians do. We also do not have a society that has been subject to the same kind of atomization that Russian society has. Acting like Russians in this context is a disgrace.

Many Americans like to posture about how they protested the Iraq War in 2003 and how that should absolve them of sin. But the question that should follow is “where were you in 2004? Or 2006? 2008? 2010?” This may be an unreasonable standard of collective responsibility but it is not an incorrect one and my fellow countrymen can’t even seem to make it to 2003.

Indifference to our export of violence and suffering while simultaneously being shocked and confused that someone would dare retaliate for having that foisted on them is vatnik behavior.

This is also before we discuss how many Americans have responded to Trump’s imperial delusions with jokes and discussions of how this will actually be a positive for American politics because they do not know anyone who has experienced the violence that invasion and occupation can unleash.

These people will also inevitably deflect from any criticism of this rhetoric with some form of the schrodinger’s douchebag argument in which they were simultaneously joking but also you’re a hysterical dweeb for thinking it will happen or that I was serious.

I understand irony-poisoning is the new cool thing because showing that you care about your fellow humans is cringe but this is not something that should be joked about and it is especially not something that should be joked about given our current administration. I have seen Americans say (claiming this to be in jest) that “Canadians have no real culture” or “Canada wasn’t a sovereign country until the 80s” which may seem to be a stupid joke but this is also how you normalize the invasion, occupation, and forced assimilation of another nation.

“We are brotherly peoples, what’s really going to change for you?” is a genuinely repulsive statement because Russia’s genocide of Ukrainians is based on that exact idea. “We are the same (Russian), we will kill you if you disagree.”

If you spent any significant amount of time on Twitter since the Russian invasion, you’d probably have seen at least one instance of Americans of all political affiliations bemoaning Russian conscripts (who aren’t actually conscripts) being wasted by Ukrainian drones and calling anyone engaging in schadenfreude a disgusting freak.

This is imperial sympathy. A manifestation of Americans subconsciously realizing how much they have in common with Russians.

Americans instinctually sympathize with Russian invaders more than they do with Ukrainian defenders because foreign imperial wars are what American military policy in the 21st century is known for. Americans don’t remember a time when they had to fight to defend their friends and family from an invader who wished to slaughter them and take their homes. Even when we fought just wars, they were wars overseas. Americans sympathize with the Russian mobik making the sign of the cross before a grenade is dropped on him after a failed attempt to storm a treeline because they can more easily imagine a shell hole like that being their final resting place and the guy defending his home being death manifest.

Maybe we are just a bunch of fucking Russians and we haven’t realized it yet.

Yet whenever you browse social media and find a video of Russians being turned into fertilizer by Ukrainian drones or artillery, you will see an endless stream of platitudes and sympathy for “those poor Russian conscripts, they don’t even want to be there.”

How so? Why is it that so many people think this? The answer, as in most things, is popular culture (and by extension, popular history). For those of you who have found me through my social media presence, you are familiar with how there is a tendency to use “Russian” and “Soviet” interchangeably which is where the genesis of this idea of the Russian conscript within the West originates.

When people think of the Russian military (outside of the ongoing Russian full-scale invasion of Ukraine) the image that comes to mind is likely the depiction of the (Soviet) Russians in the opening scene of Enemy at the Gates, complete with human wave attacks and NKVD blocking detachments. The implied understanding is that those men are conscripts and while they are fighting for a righteous cause, the (Soviet) Russian leadership is carelessly wasting their lives.

Crucially, this is not reality.

What is a Conscript?

I am going to be very clear about the terminology I will be using as many articles or sources are machine translations from Russian or Ukrainian to English and there is an inevitability that terminology will be lost in translation.

When I use the term conscript I am referring to the members of the Russian Armed Forces who are part of the Russian Federation’s yearly conscript intake. Male citizens aged 18-27 are subject to conscription for one year of active duty, cannot be deployed outside of the Russian Federation, and are paid the equivalent of approximately $30 USD per month.

This definition is very important as many Western articles discussing the personnel of the Russian military will use “conscript” and “soldier” interchangeably.1 This is a mistake they should take pains to avoid given that the pre-2022 Russian military was explicitly designed around a professional core of contract soldiers meant to serve in an expeditionary capacity with a very large contingent of reservists created by mandatory military service that could be used in the event of an existential threat to the Russian homeland.2

Many English language articles will also use “conscript” to describe the men mobilized in late September 2022. It is understandable to jump to this conclusion but it is incorrect. The Russian Ministry of Defense has repeatedly emphasized that they are distinct from conscripts.3 I will discuss this in further detail.

When I say “the Russians are not using conscripts in Ukraine,” I am referring to Ukraine’s legally recognized territory according to international law. The presence of Russian conscripts in Kursk is well attested to and acknowledged by both sides. This will also be discussed in further detail.

Likewise, Russian conscription of Ukrainians in occupied Ukraine is another occurrence that is well attested to and more closely fits the mental image most have of conscription within Russia itself.4 It is a topic beyond the scope of this essay.

I am discussing Russian use (or lack thereof) of Russian conscripts.

Why Aren’t They Using Conscripts?

The answer is that for the same reasons many Westerners believe that the Russian military is a conscript military are the same reasons why conscription has a very fraught history in Russia. The Russian people are aware of the same tropes that we are but instead of being a far-away foreign country, this is their own history, government, and state. They understand that military service in this form viewed their lives as expendable and this institution is rife with abuse. While there are more contemporary memories of this such as the First Chechen War or the Soviet-Afghan War, the history conscript service stretches back into the days of the Russian Empire and nowhere has this institution been one of high social status.

Russian leadership is also aware of this fraught history and understands how politically sensitive the use of their conscripts are. They are very conscious of the fact that placing conscripts in immediate danger will result in extreme backlash due to Russia’s conscripts and their families fearing that they would once again be subjected to not only the abusive institution that Russian mandatory military service is but frontline combat that they have not been pressed into since the First Chechen War.

This is reflected in the extremely unpopular partial mobilization that was announced on September 21, 2022 following successful Ukrainian counteroffensives in Kharkiv and Kherson. The Russians believed it was necessary to surge in manpower to stabilize their collapsing frontlines and opted to utilize the existing mobilization infrastructure created by the Russian mandatory military service system.

This mobilization sought to specifically target those who already had military experience from previous mandatory military service and indicated that the mobilized would receive the same benefits, payments, and social guarantees as contract soldiers. Simultaneously, the annual draft would still take place but it was specifically noted to have no connection to the “special military operation.”

Despite the fact that this mobilization disproportionately targeted the periphery of the Russian society, it still resulted in many residents of metropolitan European Russia fleeing the country and a flare up of unrest that not even the outbreak of war engendered in Russian society.

While those public demonstrations within Russia which ultimately amounted to little they took place everywhere from metropolitan European Russia to the peripheral republics. There were numerous firebombings of draft offices, several instances of draft officers being shot inside their own buildings, and a mass shooting at a training field.

This is in stark contrast to the relatively sporadic acts of arson and vandalism that took place following the full-scale invasion on February 24, 2022. From February 24 to mid-September of 2022 there were 26 instances of attacks on Russian draft offices. Following the announcement of partial mobilization on September 21 and lasting until the announcement of the completion of partial mobilization on October 28, 2022 there were 43 attacks.5

While a discussion of how authoritarian systems build and retain legitimacy is outside of the scope of this essay, it is important to understand that they must remain broadly popular and they must retain a monopoly on violence. Brazen attacks on state institutions as a result of unpopular policy is something authoritarian systems must avoid at all costs.

The Russian state has defused this issue by creating a parallel recruitment structure that persuades volunteers with promises of financial compensation through signing bonuses and high wages rather than relying on the coercive force of Russia’s mandatory military service.

The Russian All-Volunteer Force

Russians who volunteer to serve in the Russian armed forces can expect significant financial compensation. Contract service promises a monthly wage of approximately 200,000 roubles, roughly 2.4 times higher than the average salary in Russia. In addition to this, volunteers can also expect large signing bonuses, with said bonuses being much larger in metropolitan Russia. Effective July 23, 2024, Moscow mayor Sergei Sobyanin increased the one time signing bonus of new volunteers to 1.9 million roubles.

These measures have effectively solved Russia’s mobilization without requiring the use of any of the infrastructure affiliated with their mandatory military service which was a significant source of unrest following the 2022 partial mobilization.

The Russian Ministry of Defense claims that from January 1 to October 25 of 2023, 385,000 volunteers signed contracts with the Russian military. Those numbers are likely an exaggeration but the lack of another round of partial mobilization two years after the first and the absence of conscripts in Russian offensives within Ukraine points to this effort being broadly successful.

The Russians have not only created an all-volunteer force but they have created one that (at least for the time being) can not only replenish depleted units but also stand up new ones.

As previously mentioned, the peacetime Russian military was notorious for its awful conditions with rampant hazing and physical abuse being a frequently invoked reason for Russians to seek to avoid service through exemptions. The wartime Russian military is no different with horrible conditions and commanding officers showing flagrant disregard for the lives of their subordinates being well attested to.6

It is understandable to believe that these horribly abusive conditions would drive away prospective volunteers but it has not and financial incentives continue to persuade Russian volunteers despite the fact that payment, especially when the volunteer in question is killed in action, is often contested.

The fact that enduring horrible conditions and risking life and limb7 for a payday that you or your family may not ever receive defies the imagination but it points to a broad popularity of the war.

For those who are not directly involved, they are free to ignore the invasion because the all-volunteer force means the war has a minimal impact on themselves, their families, and their day to day lives. For those seeking financial gain or social mobility, military service provides opportunities to pursue them. Russian society, which is already very atomized, has been provided a framework in which they can “opt-in” to the war with many reasons to do so8, or ignore it and continue on with their lives as usual.

Given the disproportionate service of Russia’s ethnic minorities relative to their population it is understandable how many outside observers will argue that this is a poverty draft. This is not incorrect but I would advise those who do so to consider that sympathy for their socioeconomic plight should terminate when they decide that military service in a genocidal invasion is an acceptable trade for social mobility.9

Citizenship Does Not Guarantee Service

While Russians like to talk up the consequences to evading service, in reality there are functionally none.

With regards to conscription10, in the first half of 2024, only 427 Russians were convicted of evading military service by failing to appear at a draft office when summoned. Of those 427, none were sentenced to actual imprisonment. 99% of those who had criminal cases brought against them only received fines, of which only five were fined over 100k RUB.11 In 2023, only 958 people were convicted of evading service with only 10 receiving fines in excess of 100k RUB.

While a fine of 100k RUB is a little more than the monthly average wage in Russia, given the conditions Russians will face at the front and the extreme danger of frontline combat in an attritional war, this would be a small price to pay for one’s life. Regardless, conscription is often either evaded through bribes, exemptions, or fleeing the country until the individual has aged out of conscription eligibility. For those unable to do so, military service is often simply carried out as Russian law prohibits the deployment of conscripts abroad and following the full-scale invasion of Ukraine, the Russian military has repeatedly stressed that conscripts will not be deployed to area of the “special military operation.”

In 2023, Vladimir Tsimlyansky, Deputy Chief of the Main Organizational and Mobilization Directorate stated, “All conscripts will be sent for military service to permanent deployment points of units and military units of the Armed Forces and other military formations on the territory of the Russian Federation.” While also noting that despite the Russian annexation of Donetsk, Luhansk, Kherson and Zaporizhia, conscripts would not be deployed to those regions.

When the Russians annexed those four regions in 2022, it was hypothesized that this was a legal basis for the deployment of Russian conscripts within Ukraine itself yet the Russian Ministry of Defense repeatedly stresses that this is not the case.12 Russian leadership clearly understands that their conscript manpower is extremely politically sensitive and it is therefore off-limits when it comes to their imperial conquests. The legal basis for the use of conscripts is not the problem, the use of them in any capacity is the problem.

An indication of just how sensitive the use of conscripts is can be directly observed by the few instances in which they were thrown into combat.

Good Tsar, Bad Boyar

Something many have forgotten about the early stages of the war were that there were limited reports of conscripts being thrown into combat.13 Something even more have forgotten is this was treated as a domestic scandal by the Russian state with Vladimir Putin himself demanding an investigation into how this happened.

By March 9, 2022, the Russian Ministry of Defense conceded that conscripts had been unintentionally sent to Ukraine and were quick to claim that they were withdrawn but not before some were captured. Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov would go on to state that Vladimir Putin himself had demanded materials on the involvement of conscripts be sent to the Chief Military Prosecutor’s Office.

Approximately three months later twelve officers would be “held accountable” for the involvement of 600 conscripts in the “special military operation.” What exactly “being held accountable” constitutes is unknown and the issue was quickly buried.

This may seem to be a minor event but the involvement of very high level officials within the Russian state, including Vladimir Putin points to this being a serious issue that needed to be immediately addressed especially given that these same officials would repeatedly state that Russia’s professional military had the manpower it needed to pursue the invasion of Ukraine and use of the conscript military was unnecessary.

The Battle of Kursk (2024)

On August 6, 2024, the Armed Forces of Ukraine would launch an incursion into Russia’s Kursk Oblast, with many commentators hypothesizing that the strategic objective was the use of occupied Kursk as a bargaining chip in future negotiations, a simple morale boost to show that Ukraine was capable of offensive actions, or even a demonstration to Western partners that Russian sabre rattling was just that.

However, an extremely relevant objective of the campaign was to target the very politically sensitive conscripts who were used in a border guard or garrison capacity within the Russian homeland due to the professional military being required for frontline combat duties in the invasion of Ukraine.

Ukraine has limited ability to “bring the war home” and target Russian resolve on the homefront due to their strategic bombing campaign exclusively attacking military or economic targets14 and Russia’s extensive use of volunteers.15 By launching an offensive into Russia, Ukraine could target conscript formations as they are uniformed combatants and even the most obtuse arguments against escalation still allow a country to engage uniformed members of the opposing military in combat.

Zelenskyy himself acknowledged this objective and referred to it as “replenishing the "exchange fund" – by taking the occupiers as captives and thus helping to free our people from Russian captivity.” The Ukrainians very clearly understand the value of Russian conscripts, especially in contrast to Russian volunteers, and this is easily illustrated by comparing previous prisoner swaps to the prisoner swaps that happened immediately after the Kursk offensive.

The Price is Right

On August 15 both Russian and Ukrainian representatives announced they had commenced negotiations for the exchange of prisoners captured during Ukraine’s Kursk offensive which began less than 10 days prior.

On August 24, Russia would exchange 115 Ukrainian POWs for 115 soldiers captured “from territories controlled by the Kiev regime.” On September 14, another one for one prisoner swap would occur with 103 Russian soldiers taken prisoner in Kursk being exchanged for 103 Ukrainian prisoners of war, many of whom were involved in the defense of Mariupol with Azov Brigade announcing that 23 of those exchanged were members of the unit. On October 18 another one for one prisoner swap would occur with 95 prisoners being exchanged. As in the previous swaps, most of the Russian prisoners were taken in Kursk and many of the Ukrainian prisoners were defenders of Mariupol.

Azov Brigade’s history and ideological tendencies are beyond the scope of this essay but it would be remiss to disregard the place they hold within Russian propaganda because of that history. They featured extremely prominently in Russian statements prior to and immediately following the full-scale invasion as they attempted to justify the “denazification of Ukraine.”

Simultaneously, it is important to understand that “Mariupol defenders” are not exclusively members of Azov. There were other Ukrainian units who fought in the Siege of Mariupol and as a result are also “Mariupol defenders” but have minimal association with Azov beyond defending the same city at the same time.

In addition to members of the Ukrainian military who were taken prisoner following the Russian occupation of the city, some Ukrainian civilians, most of them law enforcement, were diverted from Russian filtration camps into prisoner of war camps due to their profession or for suspicion of being spies and collaborators.16

These one for one swaps are notable as previous exchanges of Russian prisoners for Ukrainian prisoners, but particularly those from Mariupol, were seldom one for one exchanges and often involved very politically valuable Ukrainian prisoners.

The most prominent of these was a Saudi mediated exchange on September 22, 2022 where Ukraine received 215 prisoners in exchange for 55 Russians or Russian collaborators. This swap involved many high profile prisoners on both sides.

For the Ukrainians, most of those who were returned were Mariupol defenders.

This included British nationals Aiden Aislin and Shaun Pinner, as well as Moroccan national Brahim Saadoune, all members of the Ukrainian 36th Separate Marine Brigade.17 They would be traded along with their commander Sergey Volynsky.

Prominent members of Azov’s leadership such as Denys Prokopenko, the commander of Azov battalion in addition to four other Azov commanders would also be traded.

For the Russians, by far the most prominent of the 55 they received was Viktor Medvedchuk, a pro-Russian Ukrainian oligarch and personal friend of Vladimir Putin18 who was arrested in April 2022 attempting to cross into Russia after escaping house arrest.

The Russian government very clearly understands their conscripts are extremely politically sensitive given that they’re willing to rapidly negotiate one for one trades that previously required extremely prominent Ukrainian prisoners.

The assertion that the Russians are both making extensive use of conscripts and that they have a complete disregard for their lives is incongruent with the measures taken to remove them from combat duties, assure the public they will not see combat, and the rapidity with which they engage in prisoner swaps to bring those who did see combat home.

The Russian Glass Jaw

One observation is that the Russian political system is brittle and true mobilization by activating their conscript military for use in frontline combat risks breaking the system. While the protests following the full-scale invasion or the 2022 partial mobilization did face Russian riot police, they were not crushed by them. They flamed out when people realized that the war would not come for them. If the Russians are forced to tap the conscript military they are likely to face significant domestic unrest necessitating either concessions or crackdown. The former will eat into the newly tapped manpower supply while the latter will require soldiers who then cannot be sent to the front.

The social contract in Putin’s Russia has revolved around Putin being the strongman who kept the chaos of the 90s away and left the common folk alone. This risks shattering that contract.

Another observation is that North Korea’s provision of manpower (a brigade sized element at time of writing with rumors of up to 100,000 to be sent in the future) is far more serious than it initially seems, even when disregarding how wildly escalatory a Russian ally becoming a co-belligerent is. North Korea’s reputation as both a pariah state and the butt of many jokes has led to numerous commentators dismissing them as cannon fodder or commenting that “they’re [the Russians] scraping the bottom of the barrel” but from the Russian perspective this could not be farther from the truth.

For the Russians, much of their approach to the reality of their invasion being a protracted war can be thought of as kicking a can down a road where the Russians continue to make short term decisions and hope that Western support and Ukrainian resolve will dry up before they run out of road.

The Russian pre-war professional military was smashed on the gates of Kyiv. They spent their prison population to capture Bakhmut. They are in the process of gambling away their Soviet inheritance. Increasing signing bonuses and wages for volunteers indicate that the supply of those willing to go to the front is likely drying up.

The Russians were running out of road and North Korean manpower will give them more road to work with.

This newsletter will sometimes discuss extremely sensitive topics such as war and genocide, some of which will be ongoing as of the time of writing. Personal financial gain in any way from writing about those topics (who I am an observer to) feels deeply wrong to me on a personal level.

This isn’t a judgement on anyone who chooses to monetize their content where they do discuss serious topics and do not use this post as proof that I am better than those people because I understand that we live in a society and people need to keep their lights on.1

I understand you may find my writing entertaining or insightful and wish to reward me for that but you can do so by sharing these essays with your friends.

At the moment I am financially secure. I do not need your money.

If you feel like parting with your money for a good cause, consider donating to the Ukrainian war effort through United24, Dzyga’s Paw, or ComeBackAlive.

If you’re feeling a little braver, poke around on social media, do your research to make sure they’re legit, and then donate to one of the many organizers who help crowdfund for units and additional equipment they need.

Слава Україні! Героям слава!

Anastasia Trofimova built her career making documentaries for RT Documentary, a channel part of RT (formerly Russia Today), the Russian state-controlled international “news” network. Of the twelve films listed on the director’s website (“Russians at War” does not appear as of the writing of this article), eleven of them were published by RT Documentary.

Given this career background, Trofimova makes extremely dubious claims about her access to the front line, insisting that she had no permission from either side to make this documentary. She states that the Russian government would have never allowed her to film as state funded media at the front are kept on a short leash and she had lost her press card due to employment with the CBC in 2022. She also asserts that she never would have been allowed to film by the Ukrainian government due to her history working for RT and mocks the suggestion that she even attempt to ask by saying “Did they expect I would phone the embassy in Kyiv and ask if it was okay?”

Trofimova proceeded to illegally enter occupied Ukrainian territory and convinced a group of soldiers that she should film them; “I said that I was making a documentary, that now in our country the main event in modern history is this war, and you are its main participants.” Their platoon commander accepted the proposal by saying that it reminded him of the Great Patriotic War, a comparison that she agreed with. She continues to recount how she worked her way up the chain of command and recieved the assent of the brigade commander who agreed with the comparisons to the Great Patriotic War.

Through those seven months, Trofimova claims she witnessed no war crimes and the soldiers she is filming also reject the idea that the Russians are commiting war crimes at all, claiming those are “impossible accusations.” This is a particularly ironic statement given that the brigade commander whose approval she recieved unintentionally admits to firing on noncombatants by ordering that she be given a military uniform so “that my own people don’t accidentally shoot me.”1

We are also supposed to believe that a former documentary filmmaker for RT did not have the approval of the Russian state, despite multiple levels of unit leadership, including a brigade commander, being aware that a documentary filmmaker was embedded with the Russian military near the frontline in Ukraine. We are supposed to believe that she filmed for the better part of seven months and no one ever bothered to report her to state authorities.

The latter is particularly unbelievable given that she made several visits to an administrative office in the so-called Luhansk People’s Republic where she requested to use their internet connection specifically because she is filming a movie in the area and they allowed her to leave a computer with storage devices in their office. The so-called Luhansk People’s Republic is a region rife with secret police and informers where any form of dissent is punished by incarceration and torture.2

I understand that the Russian military and occupational authorities are notorious for communication and coordination issues but it defies the imagination that she was able to do all of this without ever being noticed while interacting with numerous figures who would have easily been able to report her to relevant authorities.

You might be willing to dismiss this as propaganda for unwitting fools. Unfortunately, propaganda for unwitting fools has a long history of being made and succeeding.3 Trofimova’s career, her choices as a filmmaker, and her comments about her film and the context it exists within point to a deliberate decision to forge a piece of propaganda that will wash the hands of her fellow Russians.

This is worse than it sounds.

(Ethnic) Russians at War

To begin, the title of the movie in Russian is "Русские на войне." For those who are unfamiliar with the Russian language, there are two words for “Russian.” Rossiyanin refers to a “citizen of Russia” while Russkiye refers to an ethnic Russian.4 Trofimova has chosen to use the latter.

This may just be a grammatical choice and little should be read into it but words do have meanings and in this context it is a very unpleasant one.

The Russian Federation is not entirely composed of ethnic Russians and non-ethnic Russians are often overrepresented in military service (both contract and conscript) due to a lack of economic opportunities outside of metropolitan European Russia. This is reflected in demographic analysis of Russian casualties in Ukraine. The lowest fatality rates are amongst soldiers from Moscow and St. Petersburg while the highest are from economically disadvantaged regions of Siberia and the Russian Far East. Of the top 15 regions by war deaths per 10,000 working age males, 12 of the regions are in Siberia, the Russian North, or the Russian Far East.

While ethnic Russians still make up over 70% of the Russian military’s casualties they comprise over 80% of the population. In contrast, these ethnic minorities make up fractions of a percent of the Russian population yet are overrepresented in Russian casualties. The racial and imperial dynamic of Russia sending many of its minority subjects to die in Ukraine cannot be ignored given both the framing of this film as (ethnic) Russians at War and Russkiy Mir as a political concept.

Given the circumstances that many of these men are facing, it can accurately be described as a poverty draft. This is something that Trofimova does actually capture in her film as some of her subjects admit they are fighting for money but the financial motivation is not an aspect she chooses to emphasize, instead opting to depict how their motivations change. Speaking more generally, the Russian Federation has largely solved the issue of mobilization by offering large signing bonuses and significant increases in pay for contract soldiers.

Conscription continues to exist within Russia but conscripts are prohibited from being deployed outside of Russia. This requires the Russian Federation to operate a parallel recruiting structure with different incentives for those recruits to pursue the invasion of Ukraine.5 Contract service within the Russian military typically feature monthly salaries approximately 2.5 times greater than the average salary in Russia with large signing bonuses. You may feel some sympathy for the men whose only opportunity for social mobility is military service but it should not be controversial to believe that your sympathy should terminate as soon as they decide killing others is an acceptable trade for that social mobility.

The Great Patriotic War of Our Times

Trofimova recalls being told by a platoon commander (and later the brigade commander) that the film she set out to make reminded him of the journalists who accompanied the Red Army during their advance into Germany during WWII. This may seem to be an innocent comment referencing a historical event but things are seldom that simple.

The Great Patriotic War is the term that the Soviets and later Russians used to describe their contributions to Allied victory in WWII.6 Within the modern Russian narrative this is largely framed as the Soviets (Russians) defeating the Nazis where the contributions of the non-ethnic Russian members of the Soviet Union are left out. This narrative also exists outside of Russia where Western understandings of the Eastern Front often uncritically accept this framing. The non-Soviet Eastern Europeans (sans Poland) who resisted Nazi occupation are subsumed into the narrative of the Soviet partisan while their existence as distinct peoples is associated with collaborator formations within the Nazi war machine.7

Worthy of note is that “denazifying Ukraine” is a casus belli of the Russian Federation in their invasion of Ukraine. The historic Great Patriotic War framing can be superimposed onto the current Russian invasion where now independent former members of the Warsaw Pact providing military and humanitarian aid to Ukraine are Nazi collaborators and the Russians are right to see all of them as enemies.

By understanding the Russian invasion of Ukraine as their generation’s Great Patriotic War, Trofimova has accepted the Russian state’s line on this war in spite of how she claims to understand that “denazifying Ukraine” is a farce.

The framing of the Russian invasion of Ukraine as a Great Patriotic War is obscene. It places the Russians at center stage and erases the contributions of non-Russian peoples such as Volodymyr Zelenskyy’s grandfather who fought in the Red Army during WWII. It compares the most devastating war in human history in which most of the planet united to crush genocidal dictatorships to a campaign of genocidal irredentism. It would equate the Soviet soldiers who smashed the Nazi war machine at the Battle of Berlin to economically anxious young men storming Bakhmut alongside the mercenaries of Wagner Group and their penal battalions.

The Clean Wehrmacht and Putin’s War

The “Clean Wehrmacht” is a now thoroughly debunked myth that the SS and various Nazi Party structures were responsible for the overwhelming majority of atrocities and war crimes during WWII while the Wehrmacht as a German rather than Nazi institution largely fought a “clean” war. This myth has continued to endure despite being subject to numerous pieces of scholarship debunking it on a factual basis.8 This is largely due to the fact that the myth entered the zeitgeist of postwar Europe quite quickly and has proven quite difficult to dislodge as people tend to be reluctant to reevaluate their prior opinions and worldviews.

For those who are familiar with much of the literature that has debunked the “Clean Wehrmacht” myth it often features primary sources such as letters or diaries from German soldiers. They discuss their misery, the misery of their enemy, how they are inflicting misery on their enemy, and ultimately why they fight. These depictions will cause you to empathize with their suffering and the frank discussion of their motivations (at least how they speak of them) humanizes them by making them not all that different from any one of us.

That is also what makes it so horrifying. These people have free will and agency yet they committed unspeakable atrocities, many of them even describe their actions as unspeakable in their letters home to their families9, and ultimately found a way to justify it to put their minds at ease.

Trofimova’s depiction intends to have the viewer empathize with the Russian soldier but it does not humanize them. Yes, most people would instinctively empathize with someone fighting in a war they don’t fully understand and seeing their comrades return as casualties but you cannot humanize someone while simultaneously denying them fundamentally human aspect of free will and agency. Her insistence on depicting of her fellow Russians as confused and miserable with minimal agency obfuscates the truth within the film itself that they were largely motivated by money.

All of these “ordinary Russians” made the conscious decision to join the Russian military and invade Ukraine. They may be motivated by money or nationalism but ultimately they have free will and have willingly decided that this is what they are.

In possibly the most obscene framing possible, Trofimova states that her intent to humanize the Russian soldier is out of a belief that “if you choose a side, you are for war” and compares the dehumanization of Russian soldiers to the Radio of a Thousand Hills which played a significant role in inciting the Rwandan Genocide.

This is disgusting because the Russians are the ones currently carrying out a genocide. The Russians invaded Ukraine in 2022 with 45,000 body bags and most of us assumed it was to hide their own casualties rather than a thousand Katyn Massacres of prominent Ukrainian activists, politicians, and intelligentsia. Every day the Russians shell communities along the border with Ukraine, they fire ballistic missiles and suicide drones at civilian infrastructure and they murder Ukrainian civilians in Kherson with drones. Western journalists portray Russian soldiers as war criminals because war crimes are found wherever the Russians go.

Despite arguing that dehumanizing a side is akin to inciting a genocide, she has chosen not to depict Ukrainians at all. The Russians are continuously made out to be the victim. They are shown to be miserable and poorly-equipped and their attitudes of indifference turn to vengeance after they are sent on an assault near Bakhmut and take heavy casualties in an attempt to illustrate how war changes people.10 The Russian director goes so far as to describe the war that was initiated by Russia as “a huge tragedy for our region.” As far as Trofimova is concerned, the Russian perspective of the war is the only perspective of the war.

In contrast, Ukrainians never appear in the film. They only appear offscreen as “the enemy” referred to with slurs and the source of suffering the Russian soldiers are enduring with the not so subtle implication that if the Ukrainians just gave up, their nightmare would end. This all occurs as the Russians deny any of their own could have ever committed war crimes all while they stand on occupied land and their countrymen rain shells upon it.

This Has All Happened Before and it is Happening Again

We are watching the narrative of “Putin’s War” being forged as we speak. The idea that the Russian people don’t want this war. The idea that they’re being manipulated by Putin’s ambitions. The idea that Vladimir Putin deserves the entirety of the blame for this war and the conduct of the military of the Russian Federation. The pan-slavic “Brothers’ War” narrative in which the Ukrainian and Russian people have more in common than not and therefore the fighting is pointless.

Russians at War is doing all of these things.

The “Putin’s War” narrative would have us believe that every executed POW and civilian was executed by Putin himself. That the missiles and drones which strike Ukrainian civilian infrastructure on a daily basis were fired by Vladimir Putin. It feeds into an existing narrative of the Russian people being powerless to oppose Putin which absolves them of guilt as they sit back and continue to enjoy life while their countrymen enlist in the military to kill Ukrainians.

Many westerners have already accepted this narrative and this film will prove to reinforce that prior understanding. Some of the film’s strongest defenders are perpetuating the “Putin’s War” narrative while also incorporating ridiculous comparisons of this film to All Quiet on the Western Front or the idea that the young men enlisting in the Russian army don’t yet have fully developed brains.

The director as well as many of her defenders repeatedly claim that the Russian state would have never let her make this film and it is therefore an act of bravery. This is in spite of the fact that she was filming brazenly for seven months with a brigade commander and local occupation administration aware of her actions. This is in spite of the fact that she was employed by RT for seven years, built her career making films for them, and RT is currently reporting on the “censorship” of her film.11 These commentators also repeatedly refuse to acknowledge the director’s history with RT, instead focusing on the content of the film without that vital context.

This is also in light of recent announcements from both the American and Canadian governments regarding Russian influence operations active in both countries with RT acting as an arm of Russian intelligence services.

The title of the film itself, (ethnic) Russians at War betrays a particular framing. The director has entirely extirpated the non-ethnic Russians doing a disproportionate amount of the fighting and dying in favor of ethnic Russians who the likely white dominated audiences will find easier to empathize with.12 An undiscussed aspect of the “Putin’s War” narrative and how it revolves around the implication that it is (white) ethnic Russians fighting is that it may serve as the basis for a “stab-in-the-back” myth. The metropolitan European Russians could quite easily shift blame to the colonial subjects on the periphery and portray themselves as failed by their countrymen.

You are free to draw your own conclusions but there are striking similarities between the “Putin’s War” narrative and the “Clean Wehrmacht” both from how they exist in the zeitgeist and how they are being formed and peddled by unwitting fools who aren’t even aware of what they’re doing.