Estimates from researchers in the U.S. in July suggested that the Kremlin faces eye-watering costs for its payouts to troops injured in the war in Ukraine.

Summary

Russia has cut compensation for troops injured in Ukraine, limiting full payouts of 3 million rubles ($30,000) to those with severe, life-threatening injuries.

Soldiers with minor wounds will now receive reduced payments between 1 million ($10,000) and 100,000 ($1,000) rubles.

This change comes as Russia faces escalating war expenses, with casualty compensation costs estimated at 2.3 trillion rubles ($26 billion) by mid-2024.

High personnel losses have led to recruitment efforts funded by regional social welfare budgets, diverting resources from vulnerable populations, raising concerns about future mobilization efforts and public discontent.

    • TroyEnglish
      6•1 month ago

      Did you take physics in high school (or elsewhere) and learn about half lives? Many of the main ingredients in nuclear weapons all have half lives: tritium, plutonium, etc – and most have fairly short half lives. They need to be continuously produced, enriched, refined, etc. to keep the purity high enough to be detonated. Some of them require breeder reactors and other fun thing.

      Well, okay, U235 has a half-life of 700 million years, but you still need to enrich uranium to increase to proportions of U235, since U238 cannot sustain a chain reaction.

      The original nuclear weapons were U235 weapons. Later bombs added all the harder to make stuff to make them bigger – fusion bombs still usually have a U235 starter to get the reaction going, but rely on things like tritium and plutonium to do the fusion bits. Even the Lithium-6 (which is stable) slowly decays to helium and tritium inside the weapon as neutrons from the other components hit it.

      Anyway, enjoy the Wikipedia rabbit hole.

      • DominusOfMegadeusEnglish
        4•1 month ago

        Yes, your first paragraph I am familiar with. What I was referencing was the fact that no one has called out that Russia has not been, what, re-enriching its nuclear stockpile? I am aware that the US does somewhat regular maintenance on our nuclear arsenal, but I was not aware that Russia simply did not do this. You’re second and third paragraph were fascinating though. I was not aware that that’s what enrichment did. Thanks!

        • @cynarEnglish
          3•1 month ago

          I think it’s more the fact that the Russians likely wouldn’t be selling their “good” nukes. They would be selling the old, run-down ones. They would be a large chance they wouldn’t detonate properly.

          There’s also a lot of debate on how well the rest of Russia’s nuclear arsenal has been maintained. It’s highly specialist work that can’t easily be verified by non-specialists. I wouldn’t be surprised if a lot of Russian nukes were already non-viable due to corruption affecting maintenance.