Some Russians fighting in Ukraine aren’t getting paid by Putin

Russian soldiers fighting in Ukraine aren’t getting paid what they were promised, and in some cases, they’re not even being paid at all according to new reports from the wives and families of many contracted and mobilized servicemen in Russia’s invasion force. 

One wife of a Russian soldier called up in October 2022 told the country’s regional news network North.Realities that her husband hadn’t been paid in two months, a situation that was causing major problems as she tried to take care of her young child with no help.  

“He asks about pay but only receives empty promises. His commanders tell him he just needs to wait, but there’s been no money coming in for two months now,” the young mother said according to a translation provided by Radio Free Europe Radio Liberty. 

“You probably know yourself that it’s not easy to raise a child on 20,000 to 30,000 rubles ($250-$380) a month because you need diapers, food, and so on,” the woman added. 

According to Radio Free Europe, incidents of Russian soldiers not being paid aren’t isolated. Some media sources inside the country have begun reporting on social media chatter talking about cases of soldier pay being delayed or not being given out at all.

Verstka is an independent Russian news organization and it dug into the chats of thousands of citizens across 52 regions on the social media network VKontakte, the Russian version of Facebook, and discovered that Russia’s pay problems have gotten bad. 

“Are we going to start fighting for free?” one angry VKontakte user asked according to a translation provided by The Moscow Times. 

Russia’s problems only really started piling up in 2023 but Verstka noted that some comments mentioned people had been waiting for their pay since November. The news organization said it tried to reach out to some of those people but received no reply.

It isn’t just pay problems plaguing Russian soldiers either, Verstka added that some mobilized servicemen haven’t been receiving their promised allowances—extra pay for fighting in Ukraine—nor their social benefits. But what’s causing all of these issues?

Verstka spoke with several Russians willing to talk and found that one of the biggest issues in soldiers' missing payments may be the Russian military’s failing bureaucracy. Payment delays were often due to soldier transfers between units as well as lost or missing paperwork. 

Valentina Melnikova is the head of the Committee of Soldiers’ Mothers of Russia and she told Verstka that she believed the delay in payments was due to the collapse of the army’s bureaucracy in the face of so many soldiers fighting in Ukraine. 

"We've never had so many people involved in conflicts before," Melnikova told Verstka according to a translation from Newsweek. "There is no experience of working with such personnel."

According to The Moscow Times, the starting salary of a Russian soldier is set at 195,000 rubles per month—or $2,434 U.S. dollars as of April 5th—a number the news organization said was 14 times higher than the median salary in most regions of Russia.

Mobilized, contracted, and volunteer soldiers seem to be the groups most affected by pay problems according to Verstka, but the issue has been widespread and it already caused serious consequences in the war. 

In November 2022, 100 soldiers at a training center in Ulyanovsk went on strike after not receiving their promised pay from the Russian government according to Business Insider, who cited information from Russian news outlet The Insider. 

Photo by Telegram @horizontal_russia

"We are risking our own lives to die for your safety and peaceful life!" the soldiers wrote in a statement. "We refuse to participate in the special military operation and will seek justice until we are paid the money promised by our government," the soldiers added.

While there haven't been other reported cases of soldier revolts over pay issues, Russia’s growing payment delays could foster more resentment among its troops, and it could also be a signal that Moscow doesn’t have the ability to properly pay its troops.