Among Russians who follow their country’s war in Ukraine, it’s difficult to overstate the lasting, demoralizing impact of the story of Ernest and Goodwin, the call signs of two experienced Russian drone pilots in Ukraine. In September 2024, after they exposed their commander’s corruption, they were sent to the front on a so-called nullification mission—the Russian army’s euphemism for a guaranteed suicide attack. Their deaths in Ukraine ignited public outrage on pro-war Telegram channels, forcing even the Kremlin to publicly address the issue. Col. Igor Puzik, the corrupt commander who sent the drone pilots to their deaths, is still in charge of his regiment and is regularly praised on state TV. Among contract soldiers, puzikovschina has become a grim neologism for a Russian command structure riddled with impunity, incompetence, and lethal betrayal; a warning that merit and loyalty no longer protect you from being used, abused, and even killed for a superior’s corruption and other ambitions.
Puzikovschina now signifies a systemic collapse of trust between the military’s leaders and its rank and file. The problem is no longer limited to isolated cases; it is endemic. Whole regiments function as private fiefdoms, with officers siphoning off supplies, selling fuel meant for troops, and responding to complaints by sending the complainers on nullification missions at the front. On his Telegram channel, a mobilized soldier with the username Vault 8 described thousands of contract soldiers who were promised one-year contracts by their recruiters, only to have their service indefinitely extended. Experienced submarine crews and intercontinental ballistic missile operators have found themselves forced into assault infantry, regardless of skills or medical conditions, because they are more valuable to the Russian General Staff as cannon fodder than as specialists.
Among ordinary contract soldiers and mobilized recruits, there is now almost universal contempt for military generals, many of whom have become infamous for nepotism, gross incompetence, and indifference toward appalling loss of life at the front. Gen. Aleksandr Lapin became the symbol of this rift after awarding a medal to his own son at the front while Russian troops under the father’s command were retreating in Ukraine’s Kharkiv region in 2022, a gesture now remembered as emblematic of the high command’s obliviousness. Col. Gen. Rustam Muradov’s endless offensives near the Ukrainian town of Vuhledar—which the Russians first attacked in January 2023 and needed almost two years to take—led to mass casualties among Russian soldiers and made his name synonymous with abject failure and disregard for human life. Stories about these generals circulate widely in the trenches and on social media, corroding the basic bond of trust and subordination between ordinary soldiers and those who command them.
This institutional rot has led to catastrophic military decisions and created a groundswell of opposition far broader than anything Russian President Vladimir Putin faced in peacetime. My own best estimate of Russia’s military losses, based on multiple sources, is 350,000 killed—or close to a million if one includes those who cannot return to service because of severed limbs or other permanent injuries. Many are listed as missing in action, including tens of thousands of unrecovered corpses. Since Russia’s initial advances in the first weeks of the invasion, these losses have yielded no meaningful territorial gains; Russians who pay attention know that the myth of the unstoppable Russian war machine does not reflect the reality on the ground. The army’s tactical shift from company-sized “meat waves” to desperate, under-equipped small assault groups of two or three men (more would immediately invite a swarm of heat-seeking Ukrainian drones) means that new recruits, on average, survive no longer than 12 days, according to estimates by Russian war reporters. Promises of extensive training during recruitment evaporate once a contract has been signed; most new soldiers get less than three weeks—sometimes just a few days—of perfunctory drills before their first combat, which very often results in their death. The operation they died for was worth nothing beyond a few seconds of footage on the evening news. The resulting atmosphere is thick with defeat, despair, and disbelief, with even Russia’s most loyal military bloggers acknowledging mutiny, desertion, and fatalism in the ranks.
Dissent now comes not just from the cowered, passive remnants of Russia’s liberal circles but from millions of soldiers, their families, and even patriotic pro-war bloggers. War propaganda, police control, and the flood of money paid to soldiers and their families have not bought social peace. Protest movements like The Way Home, led by wives and widows of mobilized soldiers, persistently picket the Ministry of Defense, despite being harassed by police as alleged “foreign agents.” Families of missing soldiers face threats for insisting on finding out their fate; some commanders have reportedly threatened to “nullify” soldiers whose relatives speak out. Survivors of the first mobilization in 2022, stuck on the front for years without a break, openly discuss their desire for retribution against their own officers as soon as the war ends one way or another. Even hyperpatriotic state journalists and war correspondents, such as Roman Saponkov, warn that unless Puzik and other notorious commanders are held accountable, mobilization will fail and public confidence in recruiting will never recover.
The Kremlin’s machinery of repression—selectively jailing the loudest critics, branding dissenters as “foreign agents,” and encouraging state media to attack “traitors”—can no longer keep up with the scale and breadth of anger. Crackdowns on straight-talking critics of Putin’s prosecution of the war—including the death of Wagner Group leader Yevgeny Prigozhin, the jailing of war veteran Igor Girkin, and the branding of war blogger Roman Alekhin and pro-Kremlin political commentator Sergei Markov as “foreign agents”—were meant as warnings that invisible red lines are not to be crossed. But this strategy falls flat when discontent is no longer led by a handful of public figures and has spread to millions of soldiers, as well as their families and friends, whose personal experiences contradict the official narrative. Independent polls have found that up to 72 percent of Russians surveyed would support Putin ending the war immediately, while more than half prefer a cease-fire to any new mobilization. In 2024, 48 percent of Russians reported financial difficulties, and more than 48,000 families requested DNA testing to find missing relatives. With each sealed coffin, each unanswered question, every family driven into poverty by war inflation becomes not just a personal tragedy but a collective opposition that old regime tactics cannot suppress.
Meanwhile, the war’s economic consequences are so severe that even the talk shows on state TV openly discuss price hikes, shortages, and public frustration. Wartime inflation in Russia stands at almost 9 percent, with central bank interest rates at 17 percent. Gasoline shortages, worsened every day by Ukrainian drone strikes on oil refineries, fuel depots, and pumping stations, have forced rationing and driven prices up across the country. Komsomolskaya Pravda, allegedly Putin’s favorite newspaper, now posts video debates on inflation, supply disruptions, and the surging price of food and utilities, which would have been taboo to mention just two years ago. What was previously easier to manage on a local basis—protests against wage arrears or state-sanctioned environmental disasters—has erupted into a nationwide political headache, harming not just the poor or the opposition-minded, but broad swaths of ordinary Russians who no longer believe the Kremlin’s triumphalism.
The Russian military’s recruitment crisis exemplifies the collapse of faith in military and state promises. Despite sign-up bonuses for new recruits that are worth as much as seven times the median annual wage—and despite the regime’s propaganda—the military is struggling to replace losses at the front. The gaps are now filled with the incarcerated, the desperate, and the marginalized. “Until measures are taken against Puzik that society sees as justice,” Saponkov wrote on his Telegram channel, “you could raise bonuses to 20 million [rubles, equivalent to approximately $240,000] and it still won’t help.” No act of financial persuasion can restore trust once it has been lost at this scale.
When even state-approved war correspondents and decorated veterans deride or ignore the chain of command, the social contract that once united Russia around the promise of a quick victory is in tatters. Russian morale has not merely declined—it has imploded, the result of cascading betrayals, visible incompetence, and the relentless exposure of military and state lies. Yes, the Kremlin has successfully exiled, jailed, and beaten the old liberal opposition into almost complete impotence. Over the years, Putin has built a society atomized by design, where any kind of unsanctioned grassroots organizing is immediately outlawed. But as the promise of national greatness and unity through war is collapsing, all of the Kremlin’s coercive power will be tested—not against a reform movement among a small urban elite but against simmering, unpredictable disillusionment among the regime’s own supporters and across wide swaths of the population.
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