By Murad Rakhimov | 2025-11-21

In Russia, the toll of the war in Ukraine is turning up in an unexpected place: government ledgers for prosthetic limbs. The country is buying far more artificial arms and legs than it did just a few years ago, a telling sign of how many soldiers are coming home with life-altering injuries.

Behind each new prosthetics contract is someone beginning a long, difficult recovery -- and a reminder of the scale of the fighting that often gets lost in official reports.

Experts believe the number of newly disabled veterans could reach into the hundreds of thousands. Before Russia's full-scale invasion in 2022, the government spent about 33 billion RUB ($410 million) a year on prosthetics. This year, that amount has tripled to 75.4 billion RUB, or about $935 million.

Prosthetic spending surge

The rise is set to continue. Janis Kluge of the German Institute for International and Security Affairs noted in his October X post that the draft 2026 budget allocates 98.16 billion RUB (over $1.2 billion) for prosthetics.

Analysts say these swelling figures reflect the scale of Russian army losses in Ukraine.

Timur Grishin of the Russian Guild of Prosthetists and Orthopedists linked the surge directly to combat injuries. In June, The Moscow Times cited him as saying that most new patients requiring prosthetics and rehabilitation come from the front. At the same time, support for civilians with disabilities has diminished.

Alisher Ilkhamov, director of Central Asia Due Diligence, warned that major allocations for prosthetics will deepen an already expanding deficit.

"The government will have to find the funds somewhere," he told Kontur. "The most likely outcome is a reallocation from existing social programs. Combined with rising inflation and gasoline shortages, this will fuel rising social tensions."

Casualties and impact

By the end of 2024, roughly 376,000 Russian service members had been wounded severely enough to qualify as disabled, according to the International Institute for Strategic Studies. The group estimates Russia's total losses from 2022 to 2024 at about 783,000 troops, including 172,000 killed and 611,000 wounded.

Ukraine's General Staff places Russia's overall combat losses far higher, reporting more than 1.16 million personnel killed, wounded, missing or captured as of November 20.

Independent counts by Mediazona have confirmed more than 80,000 named deaths as of early November, though researchers note that all tallies are likely incomplete.

Last year, a high-ranking Russian official told The New York Times that about half of Russia's seriously wounded veterans have undergone amputations. Based on IISS estimates, the number of amputees returning from the front may have exceed 180,000 by the end of 2024.

The Social Fund of Russia reports that the country added about 290,000 newly registered disabled people between 2023 and 2024, surpassing a previous record set in 2005. As of June, Russia had 11.4 million registered disabled residents, including 788,000 children.

The Kremlin is now spending record sums on the war and its aftermath, including prosthetics and long-term rehabilitation for returning soldiers. At the same time, advocates say support for disabled civilians is growing more limited and uneven in quality.

For comparison, the Soviet Union's nine-year war in Afghanistan left more than 28,000 veterans disabled, while Russia's two Chechen wars added another 13,000.

Prosthetic quality issues

Concerns in Russia now center not only on the rising demand for prosthetics but on their declining quality.

A March survey by the Defenders of the Fatherland Foundation in Saint Petersburg found that 40% to 50% of disabled veterans were unhappy with their leg prosthetics, and all respondents said their arm prosthetics were unsatisfactory.

Fontanka reported that, until recently, soldiers assumed they could seek a replacement from the Russian Social Fund if a Defense Ministry prosthetic proved substandard.

A government decree that took effect January 1 ended that option. Veterans must now wait two years after receiving a Defense Ministry prosthetic before they can obtain an electronic certificate for another.

"That's why we need to tell the warfighters that the prosthesis they received -- they should take care of it, use it, and, instead of suffering, get it repaired. So there won't be any negativity," Irina Shchitova, an employee of the Defenders of the Fatherland Foundation, told Fontanka.

Novaya Gazeta reported in July that quality declined as Russia increased the share of domestically produced rehabilitation equipment from 17% to 50%. The Icelandic company Ossur withdrew from Russia after the full-scale invasion, and government contracts with Russian subsidiaries of Germany's Ottobock fell 42% in 2023.

Despite this, Russian propaganda continues to claim the number of people with disabilities is falling.

Deputy Prime Minister Tatyana Golikova said on July 29 that disability rates have decreased 6% since 2018, attributing most cases to circulatory diseases, cancer and mental disorders, and omitting the surge in seriously wounded veterans.

Mikhail Terentyev, who chairs the All-Russian Society of the Disabled, said in July the group's membership grew by only 3,856 people in 2024.

Blogger and human rights activist Aleksandr Kim argued that authorities neither intend nor are able to make Russia accessible for people with disabilities, and instead act to avoid public unrest. He warned that disabled veterans of the war in Ukraine face a bleak future.

The state may celebrate them now, he told Kontur, but after the war -- and especially if a political transition occurs -- they risk becoming scapegoats.

Kim noted that many injured fighters behave erratically and received payments considered large by Russian standards, fueling resentment among civilians. He said attitudes toward them will differ sharply from those shown to World War II veterans and predicted that the government will try to minimize their cost to the state.

Dmitry Dubrovsky of Charles University in Prague told Kontur that Russia's disability-support system is built to exclude people from public life.

"In the same way, the Soviet government did not want disabled people to be seen after World War II. It hid them. And now the authorities' main task will be to give them money so they sit at home and keep quiet. This is the modern Russian government's most important task in relation to the disabled," he said.