La nuova classe media russa non può permettersi che la guerra di Putin

So keep dying then. Better be dead than poor in that strange country I guess…

# Russia’s new middle class can’t afford for Putin’s war to end

‘Deathonomics’ is transforming Russian society. Few would welcome peace. Soldiers can earn £74,000 for their first year of military service for Russia

The Russian city of Volgograd was the location of one of the bloodiest fights in world history. The seven-month-long Battle of Stalingrad, as the city was known in 1943, claimed half a million Soviet lives.More than 80 years later, the Russian version of Facebook is awash with government ads encouraging men in the city to join today’s war effort in Ukraine.“Men aged 18 to 63, we consider those with diseases – HIV, hepatitis. We accept those on parole and convicts,” reads one such ad on Vkontakte, or VK, as it is known.Having flat feet, an intellectual disability or being a foreigner also need not be a disqualifier, it adds. In return, big prizes await. One advert offers 8m rubles (£74,000) for the first year of military service – more than 10 times the region’s average wage of 712,883 rubles (£6,592) last year.This includes hefty sign-on bonuses, extra payments for those with children and other perks like priority nursery places, discounted mortgages and tax breaks.The payments are one example of how Russia’s war economy has created a new middle class in the country’s industrial heartlands.

Military families are receiving big cheques while men are on the frontlines, many of them facing death.Blue-collar workers’ wages have also surged in the wake of the invasion of Ukraine.While money is a paltry way to make up for the death of a loved one, there are some Russians on the home front who do not want the war to end. It comes as Donald Trump and European leaders try to broker a peace deal between Russia and Ukraine, seemingly with little success.Running out of patience with Moscow’s tricks and bombardments, Volodymyr Zelensky warned: “They don’t want to end this war.”While the comment was aimed at Vladimir Putin, Russians lifted out of poverty as a result of the conflict may also feel apprehensive. For many of the new middle class, they cannot afford peace.

and also, yeah, “putin’s war”