- Two US researchers say Russia’s promised payments to the wounded and dead would cost $26 billion.
- That amount is about 6% of the 2024 state budget, which is $414 billion.
- Researchers arrived at the figure through open source data and Russia’s own laws.
According to two researchers’ estimates, the Kremlin would need to spend about 2.3 trillion rubles, or $26 billion, in one-time payments promised to wounded soldiers or the families of those killed in Ukraine.
That’s about 6% of Russia’s total budget for 2024, which is 36.6 trillion rubles, or $414 billion.
The figures were calculated by Thomas Lattanzio, a public service researcher at the Johns Hopkins School of Advanced International Studies, and Harry Stevens, a research assistant at the US think tank Center for the National Interest.
In their commentary for War On The Rocks, they used estimates from French and British officials to estimate the number of Russian casualties from the Ukraine war. They estimated a total of 400,000 people were wounded or killed, including 100,000 military dead.
Russian law entitles the families of fallen soldiers to a one-time payment of 8.8 million rubles, with an additional 5 million rubles from a measure passed in 2022 just after the war began.
Lattanzio and Stevens write that when combined with additional payments of between 1 and 3 million rubles from local authorities, most families would receive a one-time payment totaling about 14 million rubles, or $158,000.
Wounded soldiers also received 3 million rubles, according to a 2022 decree.
“Simple math suggests that a one-time payment would be equivalent to 900 billion rubles for injured personnel and at least 1.4 trillion for the families of the dead, totaling 2.3 trillion rubles,” Lattanzio and Stevens wrote.
The one-time payment fee would be “a very large amount,” they wrote.
Representatives for the Russian Defense Ministry did not immediately respond to a request for comment sent outside of regular business hours by Business Insider.
However, it remains unclear whether Russia has consistently provided one-off payments to its wounded soldiers or the next of kin of its deceased soldiers.
Reuters reported in June 2022 that several soldiers, including four interviewed by the outlet, were struggling to receive compensation after suffering injuries on the battlefield.
In November, Radio Free Europe’s Russian investigative unit, Systema, found that many Russian contract soldiers and the families of those killed had still not received their payments despite efforts to get them.
In April, Ukraine published what it said was an intercepted call recording of a Russian soldier claiming that Russia was designating those killed as “missing in action” so it could deny full payments to their families.
Ukraine claimed in June that Russia had suffered 515,000 casualties, while Moscow does not release regular updates on how many of its soldiers have been killed or wounded.
Mediazona, an independent Russian media outlet that tracks the names of those killed in the war, estimated in its July 5 update that between 106,000 and 140,000 Russian soldiers had been killed, including 39,000 this year.
Researchers: Annual PTSD treatment costs 2% of budget
Lattanzio and Stevens also estimate the cost of Russia’s treatment of Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder among its soldiers at about $15,000 per year for each patient treated.
They used cost figures from the US for its own PTSD treatment, adjusted them for purchasing power parity in Russia, and assumed that 500,000 Russian veterans would develop some form of “post-traumatic stress disorder” as a result of the war.
In total, this means 660 billion rubles a year, or $7.4 billion, to treat war-related PTSD, which is about 2% of Russia’s total budget.
Russia plans to spend almost a third of its total 2024 budget on defense, or about 10.8 trillion rubles, or $122 billion.
That’s nearly double the amount spent on defense in 2023, and much of that funding is expected to flow toward weapons production.
Many observers say such a trend toward military spending suggests that Russia intends to wage war in Ukraine for a long time.
“By betting everything on increased military spending, the Kremlin is forcing the economy into a perpetual war,” wrote analysts at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace’s Russia and Eurasia Center.
