World News

Couple of nitpicks.

newly annexed territories in the far East

I would argue that it’s not really newly annexed as most of the far east was nabbed by the time of the 1689 Treaty of Nerchinsk and present day borders were more or less set by 1860 though some wiggling occurred in between.

They say they’ll pay them well but their commanders pocket the bonuses and pay, and send the men to die in meat waves.

Certainly Russia has huge corruption issues, this definitely happens and people run into bureaucratic issues all the time in getting what they were promised to be paid, but it’s not literally all vaporware. You need some veterans returning and be seen spending high or barring that at least their families observed spending the death benefits, if it’s all stolen in it’s entirety then your willing recruitments are going to dry up and limit you to convicts. The federal subjects of Russia have been in something of a competition with each other to recruit as many people as possible so that their heads will look good to the Kremlin so being limited like that would put them on Putin’s naughty list. Even regions like St. Petersburg that are comparatively rich (and therefore have a populace far less accepting of such a hazardous job when there are decent paying alternatives) compete in this by using their economic strength to recruit less expensive people from other poorer regions to keep their own recruitment numbers up. So there’s effectively a bidding war going on for anyone who will sign a contract nationwide. And since Russia has huge income inequality death benefits that are like a couple years worth of income in a rich region can be decades worth of income for impoverished regions even with variance in the regional contribution to the benefits. Because of this poorer federal subjects like Tuva have actually generally seen a pretty substantial growth in GRP, household bank deposits and tax returns even while bearing a disproportionate share of the deaths in the war.

So yes death is very likely and many do get scammed out of the full amount of what they were promised, but there is nevertheless still a tempting hook to draw in people. Many are one way or another securing life-changing amounts of money for themselves or their families in the poorer areas of Russia by invading Ukraine.

That said… this doesn’t seem to be a terribly stable framework. The high payouts have been funded by nationalizing oligarch assets for resale (targeting especially ones that seem less loyal), raising taxes and cracking down on local elites, raiding welfare outflows and of course selling a huge amount of natural resources, some refined. But the Ukrainian campaign against refineries and logistics has destroyed many of their best exports, reselling oligarchs property has diminishing returns (would-be oligarchs don’t want to be suckers if there’s a high risk to buy in and then wind up nationalized themselves so for saying something wrong so the Kremlin has been having to resale the properties it seizes at significant discount for them to consider it as worth it to buy the properties quickly enough for the Kremlin to get the money it needs right now), and the high taxes and low welfare combined with a gas crisis are damaging local economies and making people upset, while cracking down on elites upsets the elites. Since the point of incentivizing so many people signing contracts was to avoid public unrest, and it’s becoming increasingly difficult to maintain the escalating payments necessary keep the frontlines staffed without causing public unrest anyway, you could expect for the Kremlin to stop bothering and eat the less popular ways to get more men. And indeed now you have scenes in places like Penza where men are being rounded up en masse and forced to sign contracts although that comes with problems like videos circulating of their wives demanding to say goodbye to their kidnapped husbands but not being allowed to do that and so calling on God to damn the recruiters.

No, they just don't really bother actually paying it out that much or the officer just takes it.