Russia’s influx of war wounded has turned its prosthetics industry into a global leader, deputy defense minister says

Russia is now one of the world’s leaders in prosthetics due to all the wounded soldiers it has to treat, one of its deputy defense ministers said on Thursday.

Anna Tsivilyova, who also holds the role of state secretary for the defense ministry, said at the Eastern Economic Forum in Vladivostok that her country had achieved “huge breakthroughs” in prosthetic development because of the war.

“Today, the participants of the special military operation allowed us to reach a priority, flagship level. Because what our state does is much higher than the standards adopted elsewhere. We are leaders here. It’s not China, it’s not anywhere in Europe,” she told the audience. The special military operation is the Kremlin’s official term for its invasion of Ukraine.

“There is huge investment, huge amounts of money, huge opportunities that opened,” she added.

It’s rare for a senior Russian official to speak so candidly about the Kremlin’s war casualties, especially in a way that might indicate their scale. Tsivilyova, who was appointed in June 2024, is a civilian official and is responsible for the defense ministry’s financial support for troops.

She said that before the war, 11.5 million people in Russia who required prosthetics or treatment were not receiving the help they needed. But according to the deputy minister, that’s now changed.

“The participants of the special military operation have become, so to speak, the drivers of the development in this sphere, and we’re accumulating experience on a global scale,” said Tsivilyova.

The deputy defense minister also said that Russia has been providing rehabilitation for soldiers who turned blind from injury and implants for those who lost their hearing.

She said one soldier she met in St. Petersburg lost his fingers and toes because he had crawled for days in the snow to return from the front lines.

Moscow has been tight-lipped about how many of its soldiers have been wounded or killed, and stopped publishing casualty statistics after September 2022, when it said 5,937 Russians had been killed.

Western estimates and open-source evidence at the time indicated that the actual battlefield toll was multiple times higher. In June, Ukrainian officials said that Russia had suffered over 1 million total dead or wounded.

The Kremlin, which pledges to pay stipends to wounded troops and the families of those killed, was estimated by Russian independent media last year to have paid $14 billion in compensation from June 2023 to June 2024.

Russian state media reported in October 2023, citing a deputy labor minister, that 54% of those with disabilities caused by the war required limb amputations.

That year, the independent outlet Vertska cited official pension and social insurance data as saying that 2.17 million Russian men aged 31 to 59 were registered as disabled in 2023, up 507,000 from 2022, when the invasion began. It’s unclear, however, if the full scale of this increase was directly caused by the war.

The war toll’s effects threaten to produce consequences far beyond lives and livelihoods lost. The Russian economy is already showing signs of a significant labor shortage as more men sign up for the war, and battlefield losses drain its supply of young, skilled workers even further.

The Kremlin must also dedicate significant portions of its soaring defense budget to rehabilitating and reintegrating its wounded.

In July, the London-based Chatham House estimated that the country was spending 6.3% of its GDP on its military — a record high since the Cold War.

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