‘Everyone is afraid’

The Kremlin says it wants Russian soldiers who fought in Ukraine to take up ‘leading positions’ in government — so where are they?

In 2024, Russian soldiers who fought in Ukraine will run in St. Petersburg’s local elections for the first time. In his February address to Russia’s Federal Assembly, President Vladimir Putin said these veterans should become the new “elite of society” and hold “leading positions” in government. However, despite support from the ruling party, United Russia, only a few dozen veterans have managed to run for even the lowest-level municipal council positions across the country. The independent news outlet Bumaga spoke with two veterans running for municipal deputy and a Wagner Group mercenary whose candidacy was rejected to find out their motivations for seeking office and their experiences along the way. Meduza shares an abridged translation of the outlet’s reporting.

Former Wagner Group mercenary Sergey Vyal returned from the front when his contract ended a year ago. Before Russia’s full-scale war against Ukraine, he worked as a fitness coach at a St. Petersburg gym. He tried several times to register as an independent candidate in local elections, but his documents were rejected repeatedly. He says he wanted to be involved in his community’s life.

In 2024, Sergey revisited his aspiration to become a municipal deputy. This summer, he posted a photo with Vladislav Davankov, the New People party’s presidential candidate in the last elections, and wrote that he was running on the party’s ticket in St. Petersburg’s Svetlanovskoe district. However, in early July, Sergey told Bumaga that New People had refused to back him. In turn, New People told Bumaga that Sergey Vyal’s documents contained errors. But Sergey says the party gave him a different explanation. According to him, the city authorities gave the party a “signal” that he wouldn’t be allowed to run in the elections because of his affiliation with the Wagner Group.

“There’s this message now that ‘special military operation’ participants should be involved in public and political life. And the parties, depending on their administrative resources, recruit such people into their ranks. But in St. Petersburg, there are thousands who have been cast aside,” Sergey says. “Everyone is afraid to involve them in active roles because they’re different. They’d start asking uncomfortable questions and making sudden, forceful moves. So, it’s easier to forget about them and pretend they don’t exist.”

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The idea of nominating veterans to run in elections comes from the Russian authorities. United Russia, the ruling party, decided to give all military personnel a 25 percent boost in its primaries. However, even with this advantage, military personnel lost almost every race United Russia’s regional primaries, reported Verstka. In the primary for the Moscow City Duma, “special military operation veterans” took the last and second-to-last places.

Bumaga identified 28 candidates nominated in the St. Petersburg municipal elections who had previously fought in Ukraine — 25 from United Russia and three from the LDPR. Twenty-eight isn’t a lot considering 4,500 candidates submitted documents for St. Petersburg’s 2024 municipal elections, vying for about 1,500 seats.

The St. Petersburg branch of the right-wing nationalist Liberal Democratic Party of Russia (LDPR) told Bumaga that at least three of their candidates had fought in Ukraine. The head of New People’s St. Petersburg branch said the party doesn’t nominate military personnel but that there are “volunteers who, on their own initiative, support humanitarian collections.”

Sources in the Communist Party (KPRF) told Bumaga that some nominees had delivered “humanitarian aid” to the Donetsk and Luhansk “people’s republics.” “Rejections are happening everywhere and to everyone,” one source told the publication. “They don’t check whether someone’s a ‘special military operation’ participant.” Other parties either ignored Bumaga’s inquiries or declined to comment.

From the battlefield to the ballot

Valery Zinkevich, an LDPR candidate in St. Petersburg’s Moskovsky district, serves as a volunteer in Chechnya's Akhmat battalion. He started training in May 2024 and was wounded in early June.

Valery claims that prior to the full-scale invasion, he spent about two years counseling PTSD patients and delivering humanitarian aid to Russian-occupied territories. He earns his living through coaching and runs a charity called My Big Heart, which helps large families and recently opened a shelter that takes in children from occupied Ukrainian territories. Unlike regular contract soldiers who have to serve until the end of the war, Valery only has a four-month contract that ends in August. He’s currently in St. Petersburg and sees no problem with running a campaign while on active duty.

Another LDPR candidate, Yevgeny Krupenich, is running in the Pushkinsky district. Before the full-scale war, he served in the army for 12 years and then worked as a crane operator for five years. He fought in eastern Ukraine in 2014–2015. “Illegally, of course. It’s like we weren’t there, but we were,” Yevgeny admits.

He went back to war after Russia announced a mobilization in September 2022. “Before then, I’d been eager to go but my wife was against it. When they sent the summons, I got around my wife,” Yevgeny told Bumaga. He says he’s currently an active officer and receives a military salary. He returned to St. Petersburg due to a leg injury and filed his candidacy for municipal elections with the LDPR because he “never supported United Russia.”

Sergey Vyal, who was rejected as a candidate, says going to war was a spur-of-the-moment decision. Reflecting on his motivation, he says he didn’t like how Russia was becoming more “liberal,” and he also felt it was his duty to fight. Sergey’s contract with Wagner Group ended three days before the group’s founder, Yevgeny Prigozhin, launched a short-lived mutiny. Sergey doesn’t hide the fact that he would have joined Prigozhin’s “march of justice” on Moscow because “it would have been an order.”

He says he still takes “non-humanitarian cargo” to the war zone, runs a chat for former soldiers, and works as a trainer. He decided to run for municipal deputy to draw attention to problems at the front, which he believes are being hushed up because they’re embarrassing to talk about. He lists issues like “abandonment of soldiers,” “supply problems,” “weak communication between units,” “idiots among the command,” and “the impossibility of being discharged even with an injury.”

Other war veterans seeking office also told Bumaga they want to address problems in the military. “It’ll be more useful to have ‘special military operation’ participants in the municipality. When draftees and contract soldiers return and start contacting the Defense Ministry, they’ll talk to people with similar experiences. There won’t be biases and barriers,” believes Valery Zinkevich.

Yevgeny Krupenich told Bumaga that if he wins, he’ll use his position as municipal deputy to address the federal authorities on war-related issues. For example, he wants the criteria for soldiers and officers to receive insurance payouts to be made equal under the law. “In our country, you need to act; if you don’t do anything, you won’t get anything,” he says. “Most men went to war not to defend the homeland but for money. When they get injured, they start complaining they’re being cheated [with payments].” Yevgeny says part of the problem is that the men don’t understand the system — or turn to the bottle and are too far gone to make sense of it.

Sergey Vyal and the LDPR military candidates, Yevgeny Krupenich and Valery Zinkevich, are under no illusions about the limited powers and resources of municipal deputies in St. Petersburg. The latter told Bumaga that if elected, they’d be primarily dealing with issues like waste management, roads, and landscaping.

“The level of a municipal deputy is like schoolchildren competing to please the teacher,” Sergey says sharply. “Their discussions are limited to painting curbs and deciding which event to hold and with what money. It’s a circus designed to create the appearance of work.” While at war, Sergey accepted an invitation to join United Russia, hoping to gain the administrative resources to help his comrades. However, he left the party this spring, having achieved none of his goals. After the New People party denied him candidacy, he started to question the effectiveness of being a deputy at all.

Sergey believes the “system” itself is rotten and that it has left Russia in a “precarious situation where any wrong decision could lead to disaster.” “Thinking about what will come next [after the war] makes my hair stand on end. I don’t see a way out. I don’t see progress if we’re talking about ending the ‘special military operation,’” he says. “We can’t continue in a system that [works for itself and not for the people]. The system needs to be healthy and patriotic. Gradual reform won’t work.”

Story by Ekaterina Barkalova for Bumaga