25 August 2026
Ukraine needs to prepare for the return of numerous veterans of the war, “and employ them,” Vladimir Putin said a week ago at a meeting of the Council for Strategic Development. The authorities are already introducing various hiring requirements for “heroes of the Soviet Military District,” such as quotas. However, employers are reluctant to fill their workforces with people returning from the war, especially if they volunteered for it.
During the study , 60 pairs of fictitious resumes were submitted in 2025 in response to job postings on two major recruiting platforms—HeadHunter and SuperJob. All the “candidate” characteristics in these pairs—age (25-35 years), education, work experience (3-5 years), etc.—were identical, with one exception: one resume indicated that the man had served as a volunteer under contract in the Special Military Forces, while the other indicated that he had served in the army as a conscript. In the first case, only 36.7% of the “applicants” received a positive response from the recruiter, while in the second, the figure was 55%.
“The conclusion is obvious,” notes the study’s author, mental health specialist Sergei Alekseev: demonstrating voluntary participation in war reduces, rather than increases, employer interest. “If the state’s heroic rhetoric directly translated into civilian life, the opposite should be observed,” he points out in an article published in the Journal of Peace Research, an international peer-reviewed journal of the Peace Research Institute Oslo, published by Oxford University Press.
Resumes were submitted for entry-level and mid-level positions in retail, logistics, IT, administration, and manufacturing to employers in Moscow, St. Petersburg, and other major cities, as well as smaller towns and rural areas. A “response” was defined as any positive response within 30 days, including an invitation to an interview and a request for additional information.
Volunteers are treated worst in the retail sector and in Moscow. The study doesn’t specify the reason for their “punishment.” Employers may suspect psychological trauma, fear for discipline, consider the risk to their reputation, or simply seek to distance themselves from the war, Alekseev lists:
Official rhetoric portrays all war participants as patriotic heroes, but media reports and high-quality research indicate that many Russians draw a clear distinction between men who were forced into service and those who volunteered for a lucrative contract, with the latter often perceived as self-serving, traumatized, or complicit in war crimes.
The professional military contingent that participated in the full-scale invasion of Ukraine in 2022 was virtually completely destroyed in the initial stages of the war. Subsequently, to bolster the occupation army, the Russian regime resorted to a “partial mobilization” of approximately 300,000 troops in the fall of that year, the assistance of private military companies such as Wagner, criminals (in exchange for a waiver), and, most importantly, contract recruitment. As Dmitry Medvedev boasts, the army has been replenished by 30,000 or more troops every month for several years now.
But “after the end of the special military operation… many… of our guys will return… they need to be employed, and they will come with healthy ambitions, and so on,” Putin said at a meeting of the Strategic Development Council. He called for “early preparation” for this “serious work.”
Even earlier, in February, he approved a package of instructions on personnel and employment of veterans of the “SVO”, ordering the development of recommendations for employers on how to support them.
The State Duma is already considering a bill that would establish a quota for “SVO” participants at 2-4% of the employer’s workforce. While no such requirements exist at the federal level, more than 30 regions have introduced them . Some have established quotas specifically for “SVO” participants, while others apply to the broader category of “combat veterans” (which could include Afghan veterans, participants in the Chechen wars, etc.).
According to Alekseev’s research, both employers and job seekers may face particular problems in regions such as St. Petersburg, Krasnodar Krai, Vologda, Ryazan, and Samara Oblasts, among others, where quotas are allocated specifically for “volunteers” and “contract workers.”
Politically sensitive differences may be observed in the civilian labor market, which official discourse seeks to smooth over, notes Alekseev:
The [study’s] results contradict the state-promoted heroic image of war participation. If the official glorification [of contract soldiers] directly influenced employers’ behavior, the fact of voluntary service should have been neutral or even beneficial [for the applicant]. Instead… it became a disadvantage compared to regular conscription.
What employer is going to hire rapists and child killers?
Hospitals?
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Hiring such filth is risky business. They are zombies who are addicted to drugs, alcohol, and violence. The mafia regime practically created a million Frankenstein Monsters. Their potential violence toward their own population is exactly what mafia land deserves.