Patriots and Mercenaries: Five Questions on Ethnicity in Russia’s Army

How has Russia kept up its invasion for so long? What’s the strategy, and how does manpower fit into it?

Russia’s strategy is to wear Ukraine down by dipping into the materiel stockpile it inherited from the Soviet Union. Russia has a lot of kit and is clearly not casualty averse. Its plan is to signal it can fight a war of attrition for as long as it takes, betting that at some point the West will stop supporting Ukraine, or Ukrainians will capitulate, because a long war favors the side with the deeper manpower reserves.

Russia has mobilized these reserves across three waves. Early on, Russia threw practically its entire military into the fight expecting a quick win by seizing Kyiv within days. If that had worked, there would have been no manpower problem.

But Russia failed to subdue Kyiv, so a second wave of mobilization (a partial one) started midway through 2022. There was coercion, and some fled from the draft, but also plenty of “patriots” who had been primed with World War II propaganda since 2014 joined, believing Russia to be defending itself from the West.

For much of the last two years, however, Russia has been in a distinct third phase of recruitment, which I’d summarize as a cynical “cash for service” equilibrium. The Kremlin does not want to engage in general mobilization, so the state pays people to fight. People with limited alternative economic opportunities can earn a comparatively decent living by signing up for a one-year contract—if they live, that is. There’s often family pressure to join despite the risks. Once they’re in the system, the military then encourages them to renew.

How long Russia can keep it up? We don’t know, but it appears that the intense manpower needs of the Russian military are being met. Numbers like 1,500 casualties per day or 30,000 casualties per month are thrown around by experts. A year and a half ago, the question became whether the fiscal capacity of the Russian state could sustain this. Russia sells a lot of oil, yes, but also faces a tight labor market, inflation, and sanctions. I don’t know what else to say, except that Kremlin military planners probably don’t think they’ve scraped the bottom of the barrel yet. A lot of Russians turn 18 every year—and many seem willing to take the money.

But this isn’t what the paper is about, I’m just repeating what other smart folks say.

So your actual research—what did you find? What are the ethnic divisions in Russian society, and how do they manifest in the military?

Russia is like any other large post-industrial society that’s built on the back of an empire. It has a complex ethnic mosaic which was scientized during the Soviet era, when a citizen’s ethnicity would be listed in their passport. From that, there is a crude hierarchy which exists in the minds of citizens—many sociological studies have affirmed this.

At the top, you have ethnic Russians and a group known as the Eastern Slavs: Russians, Ukrainians, and Belarusians. These people “own” the state. The Russians are the first among equals, but ethnic Ukrainians and Belarussians can intermarry with Russians and therefore become Russian. These groups also have their own states, but in the Russian narrative, Ukraine is a fake state whose sovereignty is conditional.

Just below the Eastern Slavs are groups that are ethnically distinct but enjoy relatively high status because they are seen as useful and loyal to Russia. Here you would include Armenians, Georgians, Jewish people, and in military matters specifically, the Tatars—a Muslim ethnic group who have a reputation for being great warriors for the Russian state going back hundreds of years.

Below them are the other Muslim peoples of Central Asia. There have strong negative stereotypes regarding their competence, martial fitness, or loyalty. These stereotypes are cruel but pervasive. I wrote my first book on Tajikistan and lived there for a long time. When I told Russians that I worked in Tajikistan, their normal response was some variant of “why would you go to Tajikistan? Don’t you know it’s full of Tajiks?”

Sometimes ethnic minorities join the Russian military because they want to fight for their groups’ rights. And sometimes they join in order to shed their group identity. A lot of nonethnic Russians believe that if they fight on behalf of Russia, they might be accepted into the nation—and that this is desirable. That’s a well-studied phenomenon across the world, from minorities in America’s wars abroad to people becoming French citizens by fighting in the French Foreign Legion.

There are many different reasons to be loyal to a government, even if you don’t particularly like or trust it. Mountains of good political theory can explain explains why people still pay taxes or let their sons go off to war even if they don’t like the government. There’s a whole bag of tricks that modern nationalist states use to make compliance make sense. For Russia—and we can see this in data collected before the manpower needs became acute—it means many of the fighters that were ordered to march into Ukraine probably did not “look like” Russians and do not have Russian names. But they had their reasons for signing up.

Russia has a multiethnic military, but your paper notes the phenomenon of ethnic stacking within the armed forces. What is ethnic stacking, and why does it happen?

Ethnic stacking isn’t a uniquely Russian phenomenon. All militaries are conspicuously hierarchical. There are always many people at the bottom of the pyramid and just a handful of senior leaders at the top—and then exactly one person. This is just the way to organize a military, going back at least to Ancient Rome.

The pyramid-like structure can suggest who the highest-status groups actually are in a society—and what the “ideal” leader looks like. When there are so many meritorious people, but only limited space at the top, it becomes a weighted coin-toss to see who gets pulled up from colonel to general. Nonmerit characteristics begin to matter.

Let’s say that society has four types of groups: A, B, C, and D. At the top is the A group—in Russia, that’s the Eastern Slavs. These people are overrepresented in the senior officer corps. The B group would include the likes of the Tatars in Russia or the Druze in Israel, who are seen as competent and trusted even though they are distinct from the A group. Then you have C groups who are seen as capable warriors but perhaps not be fully trustworthy. One example is Muslims in India—they have a strong military tradition, but in a war between India and Muslim-majority Pakistan, they might not be trusted by India’s majority Hindus.

Then you have the D groups at the bottom. These peoples are ostracized and discriminated against by the larger society. In military matters, there are strong stereotypes that they are incompetent, untrustworthy, or both. A go-to example in Western Europe would be the Roma. The way some see it, it’s a disgrace to the uniform that people from the D group would wear it at all.

Ethnic stacking is most easily observed when militaries face severe manpower needs, so even people from the D group join. If D groups tend to be poorer, they should be especially susceptible to material incentives. There is a bait and switch, however: they join, but tend to be given jobs where they are not permitted to prove themselves on merit. It is gradually made clear to them in a variety of subtle and not-so-subtle ways that while the military may talk a good game about promotion on merit, members of these groups shouldn’t be surprised if they end up cleaning toilets or pumping gas while A and B members are given more chances to go through the wickets.

For a lot of Cs and Ds, they will still take the money, since they can earn a better living at a low level in the military than they can back in their economically depressed rural community. Other Cs and Ds join to prove something to themselves, their families, or their communities.

In the course of the research, we found a declassified U.S. Central Intelligence Agency report that cited a secret order given by the Soviets in World War II. Soviet military leaders were under assault from the German war machine and needed more men.

Two things are interesting. First, they openly discussed ethnic stacking: which groups were perceived as trustworthy, and which were not. The document put together a straightforward ranking. At the top are Eastern Slavs. The next tier down contains Tatars and some Georgians and Armenians. Then there’s another tier for groups that they may bring in but will never trust: Germans, Jews, and Central Asians. Second, it was a secret order.

Ethnic stacking is nearly always a taboo, whether in Russia or elsewhere. It is not supposed to be true that if you lack the family connections or social status, you will probably not be able to ever prove yourself on merit. It would be harder to recruit if it was common knowledge that—a few token promotions aside—Cs and Ds are simply less likely to ever be saluted and far more likely to be the janitorial staff. Some might join up anyway for the money, but it’s still taboo because militaries don’t really run on money—they run on honor.

For there to be honor within the ranks, there needs to be not just an illusion, but a real set of practices that ensure meritorious advancement. That’s just how militaries run, whether in liberal democracies or authoritarian regimes. The intimation that you were promoted undeservedly can start a fight in the locker room—that may just be based on deep human male anthropological wiring.

How were you able to get insights into ethnic stacking in the Russian military?

A data set on Russian military personnel was leaked in 2022, just after the start of the full-scale invasion of Ukraine.

The first step for our research was to get human subjects’ permission and de-identify the data. Next, we tried to figure out where the data was from and if it was real. We determined it was likely leaked from Russia’s Eastern Military District. The data has birthdays in it, and the youngest person in the data had just turned 18 in 2017, so that’s probably when it was assembled. We’re probably never going to know much more than that.

We can still see a lot in the data. Specifically, we can use statistical tools to create some inferences about who people are based on their names. We develop an algorithmic process to manage the huge amount of data (over 120,000 personnel). Even if you’re not quite sure whether a soldier’s name is Tajik or Uzbek, we took a stab at it with the help of some artificial intelligence-enabled tools. From first principles, we could statistically reconstruct the hierarchy of who is more or less likely to be promoted from the baseline of an Eastern Slav. What emerges is a reproduction of stereotypes—recreated in Russian personnel choices—about the trustworthiness of certain groups.

We found, for instance, that Buryats—who live north of the Mongolian border—are systematically less likely to be promoted to the sergeant level or above compared with a Slav with the same characteristics. Yakuts—from the far northeast—fare even worse. So we would call Buryats and Yakuts “D” groups in our analysis.

Maybe the most interesting finding is that the ethnic hierarchy today seems exactly the same as the hierarchy was in World War II, according to that leaked report I mentioned.

One limitation of the study is that we know that the data is out of date. The military that’s fighting in Ukraine now is not the military Russia started the war with—it has had to adapt since losing many of its best junior-level officers in the opening weeks of the war.

That said, if you can see something in 1940 so clearly reflected in 2017, I would doubt these cultural patterns have been overturned. Embedded stereotypes are difficult to dislodge once you have a hierarchy in your mind of loyalty and competence. But it would be better if we could analyze leaked data from 2025. Someday, we probably will.

What does this all say about the nation of Russia?

One important thing to notice is that many nonethnic Russians believe that it is appropriate to be part of the Russian military despite the discrimination they anticipate. Russia is not abnormal in this respect. Every day, 18 year olds decide it might be fun to sign up in order to prove their worth as a man and to the Russian state and nation, even if that nation that is holding its nose about accepting them. Many people want to fight their way through that barrier and prove themselves.

I concluded this research more curious than I was before about the status of non-Eastern Slavic people in tomorrow’s Russia. Many of them are going to be veterans and feel like they fought hard, took risks, and survived something terrible on behalf of the nation. They may wonder if afterwards, they will continue to be the victims of labor market discrimination. That will be something that Russia is going to have to deal with after the war.

There is a squeezing vice that gets tighter the longer Russian defense planners keep this up.  Russia has to pay its new recruits quite a lot. The work is dangerous. This may be creating a division in Russian society, and Dara Massicot has made this observation thoughtfully: when a national military is treated like a group of mercenaries, there isn’t much sympathy when people then come home injured or maimed for life.

World War II changed the United States. The integration of the military and officer corps is part of the story for the later Civil Rights Movement. We had to fight a war for that to happen. I don’t know how the way Russia is currently fighting it is going to change the country—but I will be surprised if Russia does not change.

Jesse Driscoll is a professor of political science and serves as chair of the Global Leadership Institute at the UC San Diego School of Global Policy and Strategy, and co-author of Ukraine’s Unnamed War: Before the Russian Invasion of 2022.

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