Men Returning from Putin’s War in Ukraine Used to Resolving Their Problems with Force and to Having High Incomes, Dmitry Gudkov Says

Paul Goble

    Staunton, May 14 – Ever more commentators are discussing what the veterans of Putin’s war in Ukraine will do when they return home and whether the Putin regime will be able to reintegrate them or face problems like the Afghantsy at the end of Soviet times or even like the Freikorps in Germany at the end of Soviet times.

    Dmitry Gudkov, a Russian opposition politician now living abroad, puts the problem in the bluntest possible terms: He notes that such veterans are used to solving problems with force and that they have become used to incomes 20 to 30 times what they will have on return (svoboda.org/a/svoi-vo-vlastj-/33413532.html.

    Consequently, all Putin’s efforts to integrate them into the political system are likely to fail and a significant portion of these returning veterans are likely to turn to a life of crime, a development that will threaten to tear apart the social fabric of the Russian Federation and lead to both more violence and support for using state power to suppress it.