The Kremlin deliberately shields its urban populations and political elite from the human cost of its war in Ukraine, while exploiting impoverished minority regions to recruit news soldiers, according to the British Defense Ministry's defense intelligence update on Ukraine, published on 23 December. The report reveals how Russia engineered a recruitment system designed to keep casualties politically invisible.
Russia's ethnic minorities bear the brunt of Moscow's invasion of Ukraine
Since the outset of the full-scale invasion in 2022, Russia has sustained "likely more than 400,000 killed and wounded in both 2025 and in 2024," according to the British intelligence update. Despite these staggering numbers, "ethnic Russians from cities continue to contribute a disproportionately small share of service personnel and resultant casualties relative to the rest of the population."
The Kremlin keeps "focusing recruitment efforts disproportionately on impoverished regions, often predominantly populated by ethnic minorities," the report noted. This approach "better leverages financial inducements, whilst also limiting the impact on those urban-dwelling parts of the Russian population that have greater political agency."
Officials' families stay home
Russia's bureaucratic elite has almost entirely insulated its own families from the war's human toll. Independent Russian media outlet Proekt recently published a large-scale study examining who actually serves in Ukraine. According to the British intelligence report, the investigation found that "less than 1 per cent of Russian state officials have relatives who had participated in the illegal invasion."
No end in sight
British analysts assessed that Putin and senior Russian leadership are "almost certainly prepared to tolerate continuously high casualty rates so long as this does not negatively affect public or elite support for the war, and those losses can be replaced."
