Casualties among young Russian contract soldiers have been on the rise in the past month, the independent Russian journalist platform Meduza reported. The fact that Russian soldiers are getting younger has also been noticed by the Ukrainian armed forces of the invading force, which have taken a surprising number of young Russian soldiers as prisoners of war. According to Meduza, the young age suggests that years of indoctrination in schools are paying off.

According to the Washington Post, the fact that the Ukrainian advance in the Kursk region went so smoothly was partly due to the fact that the border area was defended by very young, inexperienced soldiers, some of whom had just left school. A Ukrainian commander told the Wall Street Journal that he was surprised by the lack of resistance. “Most of them were young men who had done their military service.”

Among the prisoners of war there are a significant number of boys who are completing their year of military service. As a rule, they are not sent to the front, as President Putin promised their mothers when the Russian army began its “special military operation”, but in this case, the front reached the conscripts.

80 percent youth

To journalists from Washington Post The Ukrainian commander of an undisclosed prisoner-of-war camp said his facility had been holding about 320 Russian prisoners of war over the past 10 days, most of them young. According to the commander, only 20 percent of the prison population is made up of mobilized soldiers, or “kontraktniki,” soldiers who have a permanent contract with the Defense Ministry.

Earlier this week, relatives of the conscripts captured in Kursk sent a petition to President Putin asking him to return their children home as soon as possible. The petitioners also accuse Akhmat’s Chechen special forces of abandoning the young recruits to their fate.

Indoctrination

According to Meduza, the deaths and capture of so many young soldiers is evidence that years of indoctrination by the Russian government are paying off. “For the past two and a half years, Russian children have been constantly exposed to propaganda stories about the Kremlin’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine, both at school and through the media,” he wrote. The platform.

Death on the first mission

Now a generation shaped by war is graduating from high school and heading straight to the front lines. According to Meduza, many young men, as young as 18, are signing contracts with the army and are sent into battle after just two weeks of training. “In the past two months alone, at least 13 of these young soldiers have been killed in combat, many on their first mission.”

In the spring of 2023, President Putin signed a law allowing Russians to deploy to the front immediately after graduating from high school. Previously, a soldier had to complete at least three months of military service or have completed vocational training or higher education. The new practice immediately translated into higher casualties among young people: According to BBC News Russia, at least forty Russians born in 2005 or 2006 had died by the end of June 2024, and by another account, at least thirteen eighteen-year-olds died between June 15 and August 15, 2024.

Generation S

When the war in Ukraine began, these young people were only 15 or 16 years old, Meduza wrote. Now some are following in their father’s footsteps. “Russian media often use stories of teenagers who followed their relatives to the front to promote contract service,” Meduza said. Since the war, the Russian school system has become increasingly militarized. Schoolchildren and students are taught patriotism and weapons training. Demobilized soldiers, including criminals who received reductions in their sentences when they were drafted, come to the schools. For separation Talk about how important and honorable it is to serve in the Russian army. Practices that now seem to have no effect.

Thousands of young Russians, dubbed “Generation P” because they only lived under Putin’s presidency, have now died in Ukraine, writes Mediazona, a Russian organization that tracks war casualties based on open sources. Medizaone has now identified 5,000 dead soldiers under the age of 24, including 1,400 under 20. The organization says the actual number is probably much higher.

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