Kremlin Unwittingly Creating Veterans of War in Ukraine who are Likely to Prove More Dangerous than Afgantsy Were, Grachev Says

Paul Goble

            Staunton, Jan. 11 – All wars leave in their wake veterans who find it impossible to return to civilian life after the violence they have experienced and thus turn to criminal activities. Russia had that experience after Afghanistan when the Afgantsy, as the veterans of that conflict were called, returned to their homes and launched a wave of terror on their neighbors.

            They also experienced this after the first and second post-Soviet Chechen wars, veterans of which were responsible for an upsurge in violence and murder in the Russian Federation when those conflicts wound down. And many commentators have suggested that something similar will happen when the hundreds of thousands of Russians now fighting in Ukraine return home.

            That is a near certainty, but the situation this time around is likely to be even worse, not only because the numbers of Russian men involved are larger but also because of the misguided Kremlin policy of paying those willing to serve enormous salaries far beyond what they could earn in civilian life, Denis Grachev says (publizist.ru/blogs/33/47513/-).

            Russian men who have received such funding while fighting will suddenly find themselves back in situations where they will make far less, the Russian commentator says; and consequently, they almost certainly will be even more dissatisfied with the lives they had before and more likely to turn to crime to make up the difference.