Description
Despite the enormous death tolls at the front in Ukraine, the Russian state has consistently managed to meet and, as of the time of writing, even exceed its military recruitment targets. Although the war against Ukraine has often been described by scholars as an ethnonationalist conflict dominated by a quasi-genocidal Great Russian ideology, the Kremlin has drawn its army from a broad section of society. Soldiers are drawn from a wide range of marginalized groups, including ethnic, gendered, and sexual minorities.
Recruits at the front, regardless of their marginalization or status as well remunerated contract or forcibly mobilized soldiers, have behaved with impunity, indulging in widespread atrocities on and around the battlefield. Crimes including the murder and torture of civilians and the execution of wounded and captured enemy combatants have been widely reported by credible media and government sources. Nonetheless, scholarly and journalistic explorations of the link between the state’s purportedly genocidal policies and the enactment of on-the-ground atrocities — especially those committed by soldiers from beyond Russia’s ethnic majority — has been limited.
In this paper, I explore discourses around the intersection of military recruitment propaganda, discussions of killing on veterans and serving soldiers’ social media (VK, Telegram) groups, and interviews with serving and former Russian soldiers from marginalized (LGBTQ+, ethnic minority) groups. I propose that killing becomes an act of (self-)transition between social margins and centre. I thus contribute to a broader conversation about militarism, military violence, and ethnonationalism in Russia’s war against Ukraine.
