How Putin's Secret War Pay is Creating a New Type of "Wealth" in Russia

In Ulan-Ude, a city in the Buryatia region of southern Siberia, five thousand kilometres east of Moscow, there are new cars on the streets. Not a few. Expensive ones, in a place where the average wage is a few hundred dollars a month. New motorcycles. In Siberian towns like this one, residents describe apartment prices more than doubling, people in fur coats, full shopping bags, restaurant meals, dental work, holidays. A place that was poor for thirty years is spending money. None of it came from a factory opening, or a mine, or a tourism boom, or an investment programme. It came from a single source, and that source has a price list. Sign an army contract in some Russian regions and you receive a one-off payment of two and a half million rubles. Die, and your family receives somewhere around thirteen million — roughly a hundred and fifty thousand dollars, enough to buy an apartment outright in almost any Russian city outside Moscow and St Petersburg. That is the new wealth. Not oil, not gas, not industry. A man's body, priced by the state, paid in two instalments — one for going, one for not coming back. And by the end of this video you will understand exactly why the money lands where it lands, who the price list was written for, and how it became possible to count Russia's war dead by reading its budget documents — which is how we know the numbers the Kremlin will not publish.