How to wage war and not feel it. Or rather, not to make it heard and to convey to the outside world and, above all, to the inside that the massacre in Ukraine is a distant event. However, the consequences are bearable in terms of the number of deaths. Which instead, according to unofficial estimates, would have exceeded at least 120,000 units.
In the long run, it could become a difficult sleight of hand even for Russia. But it can succeed if you have at your disposal a huge geographical space and a wealth of human resources almost six times greater than that of the enemy. The People’s Republic of Tuva was part of the Chinese Empire until the second half of the 19th century and continues to adopt Buddhism as a religion today. The Nenets Autonomous District, which overlooks the Barents Sea and is inhabited by the ethnic minority of the same name, is considered the kingdom of the glacial tundra. With only half of its area south of the Arctic Circle, Cukotka Province is part of the Russian Federation with the lowest per capita income. Until 1991, it was part of Magadan Oblast, which extends to the borders of Japan. In 2012, a survey by the Levada Center found that eight out of ten Russians did not know about the existence of these regions.
What these four areas have in common is extreme poverty, isolation, low population density and the highest number of soldiers killed at the front in relation to their inhabitants, a sad outcome shared with the Republic of Buryatia, whose soldiers unfortunately became famous for the massacre at the beginning of the conflict in the city of Bucha. Every month, the independent website Mediazone and the FreeBuryatia Foundation, founded in March 2022 by members of the Buryat diaspora, provide a statistical update on the number of Russian soldiers killed per hundred thousand inhabitants. In September, the republics of Tuva and Buryatia had shares of 57 and 55 percent, respectively, Nenec and the Magadan region had shares of 44.9 and 43.6 percent, respectively, followed by the Kukotka district (38) and Transbaikalia (South Siberia: 36.9). and the Sakhalin region (36.1) in the Russian Far East.
If you look at them as they develop, they are numbers that explain the Kremlin’s strategy well. Already at the beginning of the special military operation, the largest losses, measured in terms of population, were recorded in ethnic autonomies and depressed regions, whose level of remuneration was significantly below average. But almost all military and social analysts agreed that this “poor man’s war” would no longer be tenable beyond a certain limit. Especially after the partial mobilization in September 2022, it was taken for granted that there would be no more children and stepchildren. However, this is not the case.
Progressive analysis of the data from each survey (Mediazone uses as a grim parameter the number of funerals celebrated in each region by able-bodied and recruited men) shows that human exploitation of the country’s most remote areas is far from over. In fact, it is becoming more and more intense and the number of bereavements is increasing in the regions mentioned above. What has never changed, however, is the significant “impunity” of big cities. People sleep quite peacefully in St. Petersburg; the military mortality rate is 0.7 percent per hundred thousand inhabitants. The percentages are slightly higher than in Kazan and Nizhny Novgorod, in rich and populous central Russia, where the Kremlin doesn’t want any problems, at least until the March 18 presidential election. Imagine that in Moscow, in whose region it is just under one percent, but only because the country’s five largest garrisons are stationed there.
There is a second-class Russia preserved and another second-class Russia sent to the front, thunder the disagreements, some of which even go so far as to hypothesize a kind of internal ethnic cleansing. “At the end of this war, only the Slavic Russians will remain,” some Meduza analysts write. What seems certain is that some sort of economic selection is underway. Natalia Zubarevich, chair of economic and social geography at Lomonosov University in Moscow, claims that the special military operation is a war being waged from the vast Russian periphery, from small towns and villages with a still Soviet lifestyle, where the population is declining and where every form of income is dependent on the support of the federal center. “The army is an important employer for those areas where it is almost impossible to make money,” he told the Russian BBC. “Instead, the position offers a stable salary and stable benefits.” Just 21 percent of the population of a country with 143 million inhabitants lives in the capital and the seven other major cities in Russia. Putin certainly has no shortage of cannon fodder.