When War Ends in Russia, Violence Rarely Does
In 2025, Russian soldiers returning from Ukraine killed or injured more than 1,000 people inside Russia—more than half at the hands of former prisoners recruited to fight in exchange for pardons. This is not an aberration. It is a pattern as old as modern Russia itself.
Different countries handle the aftermath of war in different ways. Some invest heavily in reintegration, employment, and care for returning soldiers. Others rebuild civilian institutions before demobilizing large numbers of men trained for violence. History suggests that outcomes are not predetermined—they are shaped by policy choices.
Russia’s historical record, however, shows a recurring and troubling pattern: when large wars end, violence often does not disappear. It changes form.
This is not primarily a moral failure, nor a cultural inevitability. It is structural. War produces large numbers of men accustomed to violence, hierarchy, and collective discipline. If those men return to civilian life without sufficient work, psychological support, or credible legal authority, violence tends to migrate from the battlefield into criminal, semi-legal, or informal coercive roles. In Russia, this transition has repeatedly been managed not through reintegration, but through repression, absorption into coercive institutions, or neglect.
The results appear again and again in Russian history.
After the Civil War, armed bands of former fighters roamed the countryside, prompting the early Soviet state to expand its security apparatus rather than rehabilitate veterans. After World War II, millions of demobilized soldiers returned to destroyed cities, shortages, and limited civilian opportunity. Crime surged in the late 1940s, and order was restored largely through renewed mass incarceration and policing, not social recovery.
After the Soviet war in Afghanistan, many veterans returned to a stagnating economy and weak institutions. In the chaos of the 1990s, those with experience organizing violence found work in organized crime, private security, and informal enforcement. The criminal explosion of that decade did not emerge from nowhere. It was fueled by war-hardened men re-entering a society unable to absorb them.
What Russian Culture Already Knows
Russian popular culture understood this pattern long before analysts did. Two of the country’s most influential television series—The Meeting Place Cannot Be Changed (Место встречи изменить нельзя, available on YouTube) and Gangster Petersburg (Бандитский Петербург, available on YouTube)—appear to non-Russian viewers as criminal sagas. They are not really crime stories at all. They are postwar stories. (Note: The subtitles on these links are not very good. Better ones may be available if you’re interested—or watch them with a Russian friend who can explain some of it. Both are amazing series.)
The Meeting Place Cannot Be Changed, set in 1945 Moscow, shows a city where victory has not restored peace. Criminal gangs operate with military discipline. Police officers themselves rely on wartime logic—force, deception, moral absolutism—to reassert control. The central conflict is not simply between law and crime, but between wartime methods and peacetime norms. The series quietly acknowledges that war did not end in 1945; it reorganized.
Gangster Petersburg transposes the same structure to the post-Soviet collapse. Veterans of Afghanistan, former security officers, and men shaped by coercive institutions populate both organized crime and law enforcement. Criminal groups mirror military hierarchies. Loyalty and violence matter more than law. Again, crime is not portrayed as an aberration, but as the afterlife of war combined with state weakness.
These cultural touchstones resonate because they reflect lived experience. Russian society has repeatedly seen what happens when war ends without reintegration.
The Institutions Are Already Failing
There are reasons to believe similar dynamics may emerge after the war in Ukraine, regardless of how or when it ends. The institutional weakness is already visible.
According to Interior Minister Vladimir Kolokoltsev, Russia’s police force has 172,000 unfilled positions—roughly 19 percent of the total force—a number that grew by 33,000 in a single year. At the street level, the shortage is more severe: in patrol and local police divisions, vacancy rates reach 50 percent or higher. The Federal Penitentiary Service faces a parallel crisis, with 30 percent of positions unfilled in penal colonies.
The cause is straightforward. Military signing bonuses and private security jobs pay better than police work. Forty percent of officers now resign before reaching pension age. Putin has acknowledged the crisis publicly but has not redirected resources to address it—doing so would mean pulling money and men away from Ukraine.
The judiciary is similarly strained. Russia is short roughly 20 percent of the judges it needs. Low pay, high caseloads, and professional burnout have driven qualified people out of the system.
This is the institutional backdrop against which demobilization will occur: a state that already cannot police itself at full capacity, cannot staff its prisons, and cannot fill its courtrooms.
The Violence Has Already Begun
The violence is not hypothetical. It has already begun.
According to a December 2025 investigation by the exiled news outlet Vyorstka, Russian soldiers returning from Ukraine have killed or injured more than 1,000 people inside Russia since the invasion began. At least 551 people have died—274 murdered outright, 163 dead after suffering severe bodily harm, 78 killed in road accidents. More than half of those killed died at the hands of former prisoners who had been recruited to fight in exchange for pardons.
The trend is visible in official statistics. In 2024, Russia recorded 617,301 serious or particularly serious crimes—the highest number since 2010. In the first half of 2025 alone, the Ministry of Internal Affairs documented 333,251 such crimes, a 10.4 percent increase over the same period in 2024—putting the country on pace to break that record again.
These figures almost certainly undercount the problem. Military garrison courts have largely stopped publishing decisions related to veteran crimes since the war began. Courts routinely redact defendants’ wartime service or delete rulings after publication. Independent journalists have been left to compile statistics that the state refuses to track.
According to Mediazona’s analysis of Supreme Court data, murder convictions among Russian military personnel surged nearly 900 percent in 2023—from 13 convictions in 2022 to 116. Convictions for deliberate infliction of grave injury nearly doubled, and sexual violence convictions more than tripled. By October 2025, Mediazona had documented nearly 1,000 murder cases against active-duty servicemen since the invasion began.
What the courts do reveal is a pattern of leniency. In roughly 90 percent of cases involving veteran defendants, judges cited combat service, state awards, injuries, or “military merits” to reduce sentences. In nearly a quarter of rulings, courts referenced the “unlawful” or “immoral” conduct of victims as grounds for lighter punishment. Alcohol, present in hundreds of cases, was frequently ignored as an aggravating factor.
The physical violence is only part of the picture. Organized crime is adapting to the new supply of combat-trained men. Experts describe a “Wagnerization” of Russia’s underworld: criminal groups are recruiting returning soldiers as enforcers and contract killers, prompting rival organizations to do the same. So-called “khaki gangs”—crews composed entirely of veterans—are forming and clashing with established networks, intensifying competition and escalating violence.
Weapons are following the men home. In just two months—May and June 2025—Russia’s FSB dismantled 157 arms trafficking rings across 51 regions and shut down 62 underground weapons factories, seizing grenade launchers and 140 kilograms of explosives. Gun crime has spiked in border regions, with some areas seeing triple-digit increases. As battlefield weapons enter the black market, the tools of war are becoming tools of criminal enterprise.
Corruption Is Surging
Corruption, too, is surging—and this is where the Gangster Petersburg parallel becomes most visible.
In the first quarter of 2025, corruption crimes rose 24 percent over the same period in 2024. Major and large-scale corruption offenses increased by 65.7 percent. Bribery now accounts for more than 60 percent of all corruption-related crimes—and bribery cases involving receiving bribes rose 27.7 percent in 2024 alone. Russia’s score on Transparency International’s Corruption Perceptions Index fell to 22 out of 100 in 2024—its worst result in the history of the index, ranking 154th out of 180 countries.
In the 1990s, as the show depicted, the line between law enforcement and organized crime blurred beyond recognition. Veterans of Afghanistan, former security officers, and men trained in state violence moved fluidly between police work and criminal enterprise. Businesses paid the “red krysha”—corrupt police who doubled as protection rackets. Some police extorted like gangsters. In some cases, the police were the gangsters. The show captured this not as aberration but as system: when the state cannot pay its enforcers a living wage, when courts do not function, when violence is the only reliable currency, the men who wield it will find buyers—in uniform or out.
The same conditions are reassembling now. Police salaries remain low. Officers are leaving for military signing bonuses or private security. Those who stay are overworked, under-resourced, and—in some regions—outnumbered by the criminals they are meant to control. Meanwhile, corruption is rising—officials are grabbing what they can while they can.
Russian officials have begun to acknowledge the danger, at least privately. Former Interior Minister Anatoly Kulikov warned publicly that Russia could face a serious wave of crime from demobilized soldiers after the war ends, drawing explicitly on the post-World War II Soviet experience of rising “banditry” among returning conscripts. The Kremlin, meanwhile, has tried to rebrand veterans as a “new elite”—but its reintegration efforts remain underfunded, and its courts continue to treat wartime service as a license for leniency.
A Society Hollowed Out
There is another dimension to this crisis that has no clear precedent in Russian history: the people who might have helped build a different postwar society have already left.
Since February 2022, more than 800,000 Russians have emigrated—and the figure is likely a conservative estimate. These were not random departures. The first wave consisted of tech workers, researchers, professionals, and journalists—the educated, urbanized, mobile class that forms the backbone of any modern civil society. In the first three months alone, as many as 70,000 IT professionals left. Universities lost hundreds of faculty members. The creative class emptied out of Moscow and St. Petersburg.
Most are not coming back. Research by the OutRush project found that only 8 percent of those who left after 2022 have returned. More striking: only 54 percent said they would consider returning under any circumstances—including the end of the war or the fall of Putin’s regime. Among those who resettled in Western countries, just 1 percent are considering leaving.
This changes the arithmetic of postwar reintegration. When American soldiers returned from World War II, the Korean War, and Vietnam, they came home to a society with functioning courts, a free press, private enterprise, universities, and civil institutions capable of absorbing them—however imperfectly. The professional class was still there. The economy, despite inflation and recession, still offered paths forward.
Americans have not lived through a postwar collapse. They have no memory of what it means to return to a society where police cannot maintain order, courts do not function, veterans form criminal gangs, and violence becomes the primary currency of economic life. For Russians who left—many of whom know their own history—this is not an abstraction. It is what happened after Afghanistan. It is what happened in the 1990s. It is what Gangster Petersburg depicted and what their parents and grandparents lived through. The question is not why so few are returning. The question is why anyone would.
Russian veterans will return to something different: a society stripped of many of the people who might have built businesses to employ them, advocated for their care, or simply modeled alternatives to violence. What remains is the state, the security services, the criminal economy—and a population that stayed because it could not leave or chose not to. The Soviet Union, for all its failures, at least offered some socialist protections—health care, housing, guaranteed employment. Today’s Russia offers none of that.
The brain drain does not cause postwar instability by itself. But it removes buffers. It narrows options. It means that when hundreds of thousands of men trained for violence come home, the society waiting for them will have fewer resources, fewer advocates, and fewer exits than it might otherwise have had.
When Ending a War Is More Dangerous Than Fighting One
This is why losing—or merely ending—a war is often more dangerous for a state than fighting one. During war, violence is externalized. After war, it must be managed internally.
After World War II, the Soviet Union absorbed demobilized men through nationwide reconstruction—and repression handled the rest. Today’s Russia has neither option: no reconstruction, institutions already strained, and a hollowed-out civil society.
The war has not ended. Mass demobilization has not begun. Yet the pattern is already clear: men trained for violence are returning to a society that cannot employ them, a legal system that excuses them, a police force that cannot contain them, and a criminal economy eager to recruit them. The people who might have offered alternatives have left and are not coming back.
To an average Russian, there is nothing enlightening about any of this. They know the pattern. What they may also sense—and what some analysts have begun to speculate—is that Putin knows it too. He built his legitimacy on ending the violence of the 1990s. Ending this war risks reconstituting that disorder at home. Better, perhaps in his calculus, for soldiers to die in Ukraine than to return.
Western policymakers eager to broker a ceasefire should understand what comes next. Ending the war in Ukraine will not end Russia’s violence problem—it will relocate it. The question is not whether the violence will come home. It already has. The question is whether anyone is prepared for how much worse it will get.