Russia has built a dual-track approach to veteran reintegration - offering employment programs and heroic branding on one side while criminalizing any public discussion of frontline abuses, operational failures, and potential war crimes on the other, a Carnegie defense analyst has found.
Dara Massicot, a Senior Fellow at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, has outlined this contradiction in an analysis for Foreign Affairs, "Hvylya" reports.
On the supportive side, the Kremlin has created Defenders of the Fatherland offices in every region to help veterans navigate benefits, find jobs, and access medical specialists. A parallel program, Time of Heroes, retrains selected veterans for public service roles "as a way of encouraging loyalty to and dependence on the state." In 2025, Russia also launched a federal grant program to train veterans to run businesses. The Kremlin portrays returning soldiers as part of a "new elite."
But these programs coexist with laws that criminalize critiques of the Russian military and suppress online discussions of discipline issues, operational failures, and war crimes. Veterans face pressure, including threats of legal consequences, never to discuss what happened within their units. Massicot argues that "the kind of compassion and understanding that veterans need cannot be cultivated if it remains illegal to discuss their real experiences."
The suppression extends to the broader public. "The Russian civilian population cannot and does not demand answers about how the war is being fought, even as the cemeteries fill up with the fallen," Massicot writes. This apathy serves the Kremlin in wartime but undermines the foundation for genuine postwar reconciliation.
Russian President Vladimir Putin appointed Anna Tsivileva, a member of his extended family and a trained psychiatrist, as deputy defense minister in charge of veterans' affairs. Tsivileva estimates that 20 percent of Russian veterans will need clinical support for PTSD and has suggested screening all soldiers upon demobilization.
Read more: "They Will Fight Until They Run Out of Men": Zeihan Names the Timeline for Russia's Collapse.