While Putin promises Russia’s war veterans who fought in Ukraine great honor, privileges, and a place among the elite, their return to civilian life and entry into the labor market paints a very different picture. From the LSE European Politics blog.

When people think about public opinion in Russia on the Russia-Ukraine war, they are usually interested in whether Russians support the war. But a more revealing question is what happens when support carries a private cost.

Russia’s war veterans have two lives. In May 2026, Vladimir Putin received the first alumni of the Kremlin’s Time of Heroes program, designed to train participants in the Ukraine war for posts in the state and municipal administration. In this official life, the veteran is a hero: proof of sacrifice, loyalty, and national renewal – part of what Putin has called Russia’s “genuine elite.”

The second life begins when the same man applies for an ordinary civilian job. The state can award medals, stage ceremonies, and create routes into public office. But it cannot completely script what happens when an employer reads “voluntary contract service in the special military operation” on a CV and decides whether to call the applicant back.

A Test at the Workplace Door

Between May and August 2025, I sent 60 pairs of fictitious applications to real vacancies on HeadHunter and SuperJob, Russia’s two dominant online recruitment platforms. The jobs covered retail, logistics, IT, administration, and manufacturing in Moscow, Saint Petersburg, and several other cities and smaller communities.

The applicants in each pair were matched on age, education, and civilian work history. Both military entries used the same rank and comparable duties. The only substantive difference was a single line about military service. One applicant reported routine mandatory conscription in 2022-23. The other reported voluntary contract service in Russia’s war in Ukraine during the same period.

The difference in employer interest was substantial. The conscription applicants received callbacks in 33 of 60 cases, or 55 %. The voluntary war-service applicants received 22 callbacks, or 36.7 %. That is an 18.3 percentage-point gap: for every 10 callbacks received by an otherwise comparable former conscript, the volunteer received roughly seven.

This occurred during an exceptionally tight labor market. Russia’s unemployment rate was at a record-low 2.2 % in the middle of 2025, while the Bank of Russia continued to describe the labor market as tight. Even when labor was scarce, explicitly signaling voluntary participation in the war made an applicant less attractive.

This was a small, targeted experiment on two job platforms, not a census of Russian employers. It also compared two kinds of military service, not veterans with civilians. That distinction is precisely what makes the result politically revealing. General military experience was held constant. What changed was whether the CV signaled voluntary participation in this particular war.

Public Conformity, Private Judgement

The experiment cannot read employers’ minds. A hiring manager might worry about trauma, discipline, or workplace adjustment. They might fear reputational complications, make a class judgement about men recruited through large financial incentives, or feel moral unease about voluntary participation. The study cannot separate these motives.

But uncertainty about the mechanism should not obscure the central finding: employers treated voluntary war service as a different, and less valuable, social credential than compulsory service. Official rhetoric tries to fold both men into one patriotic category. Consequential behavior restored the distinction.

This matters because authoritarian wartime politics makes public opinion look flatter than it is. Direct questions ask people to compress a complicated position into a safe answer: Do you support the “special military operation”? Do you approve of the president?

Under censorship and repression, affirmative responses may combine conviction, conformity, resignation, fear, and the desire to avoid politics altogether. Research on wartime Russia and other authoritarian settings has repeatedly shown why direct measures of regime support must be interpreted carefully.

Support is not a single opinion. It has a price. A person may endorse the war in the abstract yet resist mobilization, resent its costs, distinguish between a conscript and a paid volunteer, or avoid bringing a war participant into the workplace. None of those actions automatically amounts to opposition. Together, however, they show why public assent should not be mistaken for the complete internalization of the state’s moral categories.

Hiring decisions are useful because they are non-public and consequential. Employers were not invited to make a political statement. They simply had to choose whether an applicant merited further contact. The callback therefore becomes a small test of whether state-manufactured prestige travels into a setting the state does not fully control. In this case, it did not.

The Veteran Bargain

Russia’s recruitment model has been heavily financialized. Large signing bonuses, high military salaries, and generous compensation for injury or death have drawn recruits disproportionately from poorer and more peripheral regions. The wartime bargain offered more than money for danger. It also promised honor, mobility, and membership of a privileged national community.

My experiment suggests that the status half of that bargain may fail outside state institutions. The Kremlin can channel a carefully selected veteran through Time of Heroes. Such programs can curate symbols; they cannot guarantee that an ordinary volunteer will be trusted by an ordinary employer.

That gap has consequences. One possibility is that veterans who struggle in the open labor market become more dependent on public employment, security institutions, defense industries, and political patronage. This could bind part of the cohort more closely to the regime. Another is that men promised heroic status develop resentment when civilian society treats their service as a liability.

These are not outcomes demonstrated by the experiment, but they are plausible reasons why veteran reintegration is a political problem rather than a narrow employment policy issue. Current Russian efforts to place selected veterans in public institutions also sit uneasily alongside the scale and diversity of the wider returning population.

For Europe, Russia’s future will not be shaped only by the battlefield, sanctions, or succession at the top. It will also depend on whether a large, war-experienced, and officially sanctified cohort can return to ordinary life without being abandoned, permanently absorbed into coercive institutions, or mobilized around grievance. Research from other post-war settings shows that failed reintegration can carry long political shadows.

The result should not be turned into a story of secret mass opposition. Russian employers did not cast a hidden vote on the invasion. They did something more specific: when applicants claimed the identity the Kremlin has elevated above almost all others, employers valued them less.

The Kremlin’s control of public language is real. Its control of private judgement is not. To understand the durability of wartime authoritarianism, we should watch not only what citizens say when they are asked but what they choose when the answer costs them something. In Russia’s labor market, the heroic consensus stopped at the workplace door.

Sergey Alexeev is a senior research associate at UNSW Sydney and an adjunct senior lecturer at the University of Sydney. He is an economist whose research uses field experiments and causal inference to study labor markets, crime and justice, addiction policy, health, and politically sensitive social behavior.
This article was originally published on the LSE European Politics blog. Reprinted by permission.