ussian President Vladimir Putin has sought from the very start of his “special military operation” in Ukraine to prevent the conflict from intruding into the lives of Russian citizens, particularly those who live in Moscow and St. Petersburg. As the war enters its fifth year, this effort is increasingly failing.
Ukraine is attacking military facilities and refineries around Russia, causing significant damage and producing shortages in gasoline. Western sanctions are biting harder into the fragile Russian economy. Along with huge expenditures on the military (which now receives 8 percent of GDP), sanctions are restricting the flow of long-term capital for the civilian economy. Russia’s energy revenues dropped by about a fifth in 2025. Fiscal problems are growing, and the country may be on the verge of a serious recession. The budget deficit in 2025 was 2.5 percent of GDP, five times higher than was predicted at the beginning of the year. To raise revenue, VAT taxes have been raised, and a “technological fee” will be assessed on imported electronics and household appliances.
Beyond the economy, there is growing evidence of the war’s negative, long-term impacts on Russian society, from rising crime and corruption to worsening political repression. These portend greater dislocations and strained social cohesion.
The Impact of Declining Population
The war in Ukraine has caused a horrendous loss of life, which will only exacerbate the long-term impact on Russia’s declining population. Despite decades-long efforts by Russian governments, the birth rate (fertility) officially remains no higher than it was in 1991, 1.78 births per woman. Experts believe it is likely much less, around 1.5 births (2.1 births are required to maintain population).
In a 2024 report for the Atlantic Council, Professor Harley Balzer wrote:
“United Nations scenarios project Russia’s population in 2100 to be between 74 million and 112 million compared with the current 146 million. The most recent UN projections are for the world’s population to decline by about 20 percent by 2100. The estimate for Russia is a decline of 25 to 50 percent.”
As early as 2023, Fareed Zakaria observed that Russia was “losing the 21st century.” He wrote in the Washington Post:
What stands out in Russia is its mortality. In 2019, before covid [sic] and the invasion of Ukraine, the World Health Organization estimated a 15-year-old boy in Russia could expect to live another 53.7 years, which was the same as in Haiti and below the life expectancy for boys his age in Yemen, Mali, and South Sudan. Swiss boys around the same age could expect to live more than 13 years longer.
The brutal war could make such mortality figures even worse. The Center for Strategic and International Studies recently published a report which estimates that Russians killed, wounded and missing in the war may total up to 1.2 million, of which 325,000 may have been killed. Ukraine’s casualties, by contrast, are estimated to range from 500,000 to 600,000. Of those, 100,000 to 140,000 may have died.
The war is already having a huge impact on the Russian labor market. Shortages abound. Russia’s labor minister is reported to have told Putin last year that Russia will have a shortage of 2.4 million workers by 2030. Others put the number higher. Young men can now make much more by signing up for the military (with substantial bonuses) than they can working in civilian jobs in their home oblasts. Not surprisingly, businesses now have to pay higher salaries, which in turn drives up costs and inflation (officially set at 6 to 7 percent in September 2025 but probably higher). Russia used to rely on migrant labor from Central Asia, but that has diminished in the wake of the security crackdown after the 2024 attack on the Crocus City Hall theater by Tajik terrorists. Now Russia is turning to migrant labor from India and Sri Lanka.
Returning Soldiers and the Growing Incidence of Crime
Russian state media reported in January that there were currently about 250,000 unemployed veterans of the “special military operation” who had returned to Russia from Ukraine. Almost as soon as the news was published, the story disappeared, undoubtedly to prevent raising public anxiety. Many Russians remember the difficult return of Soviet-era war veterans from Afghanistan, which involved fewer people. Crime, drug use, and domestic instability surged. Some of those soldiers contributed to the growth of organized crime.
The government is reportedly working to help soldiers returning from Ukraine (PDF) rejoin civic life, but it will not be easy. Russia may have the resources to provide assistance, but it does not have the social infrastructure capacity, particularly in health care and law enforcement. Many servicemen are likely to be able to earn only a fraction of the money they earned at war, potentially causing discontent. Putin sees this as a potential political risk, according to Russian sources who spoke to Reuters, and he wants to manage it to avoid destabilizing society and the Russian political system.
One of the most striking changes in Russia since the beginning of the Ukraine war has been the growing incidence of crime. In a 2025 article now well known among Russian analysts, V.A. Maslov of the Urals Law Institute of the Russian Ministry of the Interior surveyed the impact of the war on rising criminality. “It is possible to state with certainty that the special military operation to some degree has already touched the life of every Russian,” Maslov writes. “Its conduct is having an impact on the criminal situation in the country and will inescapably have an impact on criminality in the future.” His article addresses: the criminal acts of prisoners pardoned to participate in the war; crime due to post-traumatic stress disorder; the sharp growth of income by soldiers in the war, along with newly acquired skills in handling firearms; fraud committed against soldiers’ relatives; social problems in families of returning soldiers; as well as forced migration, extremist behavior and war crimes.
In January, the independent news media outlet Novaya Gazeta published “The House Where the War Came,” which quantified the rise in crimes committed by soldiers returning from the war. Among its findings:
- More than 8,000 participants in the “special military operation” have been convicted of “civil” crimes since 2022. About 7,000 of them are veterans who have returned home.
- About 900 veterans committed violent crimes. At least 423 victims died (61 of them in car accidents). Fifty-two were victims of domestic violence: partners, children, mothers, grandmothers, and sisters.
- Novaya Gazeta claims that participants in the “special military operation” are twice as likely to be tried for murder and serious injury than Russians from a similar social group.
- At least 27 percent of the veterans who were put on trial had already been convicted of crimes before the war. President Putin had pardoned 656 of them so that they could be sent directly from prison to fight in Ukraine (recall Yevgeny Prigozhin’s recruitment of tens of thousands of prisoners held in harsh penal colonies to fight in Ukraine with his Wagner Group mercenaries).
Metastasizing Corruption
Corruption was endemic in the Soviet Union and remains so in Russia. It has only increased since the war started in 2022. Transparency International’s 2025 Corruption Perceptions Index ranks Russia 157th out of 182 countries. Russia scored 22 points on a scale with 100 being free of corruption and 0 being the most corrupt. Russia dropped three positions, equaling its worst result in the history of the poll. Transparency International concluded:
In Russia, a steady degradation of key democratic institutions has been recorded. The full-scale war against Ukraine that has been going on since 2022, the repression of civil society, attacks on independent journalism, the rejection of transparency in public procurement and budget management—all this creates conditions under which corruption becomes the norm, not the exception.
Numerous Russian officials have been arrested for corruption, from leaders of regional oblasts near Ukraine to numerous officials at the national level, particularly senior officials who worked at the Ministry of Defense under former Minister Sergey Shoigu.
The Ministry of Interior and Prosecutor General’s office have reported that the number of bribery cases during the war years has almost doubled. So too has the average bribe amount in Russia—it has reached a million rubles. The armed forces and the military industrial complex are the key drivers in the growth of bribes.
Repression and Societal Cohesion
Repression has grown steadily since the start of the war. Professor Nina Khrushcheva of the New School in New York wrote in the January issue of Foreign Affairs magazine:
Restrictions of all kinds have expanded over the past four years—not just book bans but reduced access to social media, crackdowns on protest, and measures to render the LGBT community invisible and feminism illegitimate. Russia’s ‘foreign agent’ law, established in 2012 to identify individuals and organizations that received international funding, has become a tool to criminally prosecute and ban from public life anyone who disagrees with the state. In early 2022, 300 people and organizations were on the notorious list of foreign agents; now, the number is over 1,100. The Kremlin has now launched a new phase of repression—going after not only the opposition but even the super loyal nationalists who long supported the war.
The Kremlin is taking no chances, despite the fact that Russians continue to support Putin and the war in Ukraine, albeit with less enthusiasm than in the past. New restrictions are now being introduced to restrict the use of the internet. The State Duma in January began passing a law which would give the Federal Security Service the right to disconnect not only mobile phone and data services, but also landlines.
Fearing any criticism of the war, the Kremlin is moving to eliminate independent civil society and suppress all opposition political activity. Combined with its heavy-handed propaganda and indoctrination campaign in schools, the Kremlin seeks to eliminate any public discussion of the nation’s future with which it does not agree. This will undermine social cohesion in Russia with long-term consequences.
Khrushcheva concludes that:
Moscow has built a larger repressive apparatus. It has cultivated a climate of fear and uncertainty that encouraged many Russians to silence not just themselves but also one another. The accumulation of subtle changes on the part of both the state and society has led Russia deeper and deeper into tyranny—a cycle that seems unlikely to break as long as Putin’s regime pursues the kind of total control that until recently seemed to exist only in Russia’s communist past or in Orwell’s fiction.
The Challenge of a Post-War World
Whatever the outcome of Russia’s war in Ukraine, the changes it has produced within Russia are likely to be profound and harmful. The long-term costs for the Russian economy will be enormous. Coping with severe labor shortages, and a wartime legacy of social problems will test Russia’s leaders.
Throughout his rule Vladimir Putin has prized stability as a cornerstone of his domestic policies. He has resisted the reforms necessary to open the Russian economy and society. Strict repression today is designed to maintain wartime stability, but it will not be effective in a society trying to emerge from the traumas of war.
Once the war ends, the Kremlin will have to convert a militarized economy to a more normal 21st-century economy. Russia will almost certainly have to open up to attract new foreign investment and to encourage new Russian businesses to grow and flourish. Foreign investors and domestic businessmen will demand fair law-based rules and limits on corruption to guarantee their investments.
All this will challenge American foreign policymakers. Helping to bring the war to an end and ensuring a secure settlement will only be the first step. Designing policies to protect American interests and help Americans navigate a rocky post-war Russian world will require creativity, firmness, and patience.
– John F. Tefft holds the Distinguished Chair in Diplomacy and Security at RAND and is a retired U.S. diplomat. He was a career Foreign Service officer for more than 45 years, completing his service as the U.S. ambassador to the Russian Federation from 2014 to 2017. He would like to thank Bob Otto for his kind assistance in helping prepare this article. Published courtesy of RAND.
