By Galina Korol | 2025-10-21

Moscow has a new idea for veterans of its war in Ukraine: ship them to Siberia and put them to work.

The proposal, floated by Kremlin adviser Sergey Karaganov in Rossiyskaya Gazeta and reported by The Moscow Times, calls for sending battle-hardened soldiers to "develop Siberia."

Karaganov argued that "Russia's three-hundred-year European journey has ended" and it must now "return to its roots" by building a "new great power" in the east.

The comparison Karaganov makes is sweeping, likening the plan to US President Franklin D. Roosevelt's New Deal, but observers say the rhetoric masks a more troubling reality.

President Roosevelt's programs aimed to rebuild the US economy and support citizens. Russia's plan, critics argue, is about relocating traumatized men who could pose problems at home, turning them into controlled labor in far-flung regions with little oversight.

The Ukrainian Center for Countering Disinformation has warned that the proposal is a hoax, calling it an "illusion of upward social mobility" for veterans that instead reveals "indifference to their real needs."

Ukraine's Center for Social Development was blunter: "The people whom the state used in the war, now they are trying to use again -- as cheap labor for large projects."

From heroes to 'samovars'

When the Kremlin says veterans of the so-called "special military operation" will be mobilized to build a "new future," it sounds like it cares. In practice, critics say, authorities have shown they value servicemen only while they can fight.

"We must interpret this precisely as repression, precisely as the authorities' way of getting rid of these people," Evgeny Stupin, a Russian human rights activist, lawyer, and former MP in the Moscow City Duma, told Kontur.

Experts say the initiative extends an old pattern: turning "heroes" into workers, then hiding them once they become inconvenient.

Dmitry Gainetdinov of Ukraine's National Museum of the History of World War II said the Soviet Union did the same after World War II, when millions of disabled soldiers were treated as "dead weight" rather than supported.

He told Kontur that about 7 million Ukrainians were mobilized, fewer than half returned, and one in two survivors came back disabled. At least 1.5 million were left disabled because they had fought in the Red Army.

In the postwar Soviet Union, heroes quickly became problems. Disabled veterans -- amputees, the blind, the paralyzed -- shattered the official myth of a "great victory."

Such men were "an unwanted reminder of what the war had cost," said Gainetdinov. Authorities viewed them not as victims in need of care but as a threat to the image of a "bright future."

Rehabilitation did not exist. Many veterans were left to beg, earning the cruel nickname "Stalin's samovars," a reference to the squat, handle-like shape of traditional Russian tea urns, mocking men without arms or legs.

The harshest measures came in 1949, when Joseph Stalin ordered disabled people removed from cities and sent to remote institutions such as the Valaam Island facility, where they were effectively detained until they died.

Even under Nikita Khrushchev and Leonid Brezhnev, little changed. Disability remained invisible: no ramps, elevators or accessible public spaces. Even war memorials built "in honor of heroes" ignored the needs of those who had actually fought.

That legacy persists, said Gainetdinov.

"For the Kremlin, modern war is also a kind of social cleansing," he said, noting that authorities recruit "problematic" people for the front and see their deaths less as tragedy than as a solution.

Propaganda will continue to praise veterans as heroes, Gainetdinov noted. But in reality, many face marginalization, neglect and the fate of "invisible" people the state prefers to hide.

The Kremlin's fear

Moscow doesn't say it outright, but the logic is simple: returning "heroes" may threaten stability more than they enhance it.

Veterans bring combat experience, trauma and disillusionment that could destabilize Russian cities.

"There are no good intentions here," said Stupin. "The government's objective is to protect itself, to protect [President Vladimir] Putin and his entourage. They genuinely fear these people, and that's why the war continues."

"Imagine someone who has lived his entire life in Krasnodar. And now they invite him to relocate, say, to Nizhnevartovsk. For the locals, it is a familiar environment, but for him, it is exile," he added.

Some analysts say the plan may not be about Siberia at all. Instead, they argue, it could be a smokescreen, a psychological operation meant to create an illusion of purpose for veterans and reassurance for society.

"The Kremlin has no plans to develop Siberia," Alexey Baranovsky, a journalist and veteran of the Free Russia Legion, told Kontur. He called the proposal "another cheap psyop," meant to create false hope that the war's end is near, comparing it to a "carrot on a string."

Baranovsky said the war will continue until Russia exhausts its material and human resources. By then, he argued, there may be no veterans left to hide.

"Putin plans to fight to the last mercenary. As a result, the problem of rehabilitating veterans may simply not arise. They will all be in Ukrainian soil, some in body bags, some not in body bags."

He also pointed to what he called the hypocrisy of such initiatives. If Moscow wanted to solve social problems, it would invest in domestic infrastructure projects that create jobs rather than wage war in Ukraine.

"But Moscow's policy is not to build, but to destroy. They are not allowing their own population or their neighbors to live," Baranovsky concluded.