Russia counts its bears. It doesn’t count its dead

Russian state media can tell you, almost to the person, how many Russians bears have killed this year. RIA Novosti counted 26 by mid-October. The tally has since reached 29.Ask the same state how many of its soldiers have died in Ukraine, and the last official answer is 5,937. That was September 2022. Mediazona and the BBC’s Russian service have since put names to 285,023.A Russian woman summed it up in an online video. Judging by television, she said, the country’s gravest problem is bears. Nobody mentions the burning refineries, the taxes, the utility bills, the pension savings. Then she corrected Orwell: war is peace, freedom is slavery, ignorance is bliss. Why know the truth, asked the blogger who shared her clip, when you can pray to the peresidelets — the Overstayer, as Russians online call President Vladimir Putin? She left one item off her list. A state that counts bear attacks but not its war dead has found a new place to save money: the dead.Russians call it grobovye — coffin money, the lump sum a region adds when one of its soldiers is killed. Propaganda calls those soldiers liberators. At least 12 regions have cut or scrapped the payment.Ulyanovsk paid a million rubles. In February, 500,000. Since April, 50,000 — about $620. Saratov cut its payment tenfold, effective Nov. 1. Kemerovo and Belgorod went from 3 million to 1 million. Orenburg and Khakassia abolished it.Bashkortostan deserves a sentence of its own. No Russian region has more named war dead — 11,905. In May, it cut its coffin money fivefold.This is not Ukrainian propaganda. The list was compiled by Anastasia Kashevarova, a pro-war blogger and former adviser to Duma Speaker Vyacheslav Volodin. Federal payments, she notes, remain unchanged. For now.Recruits cost more. Regional signing bonuses average a record 3.4 million rubles, by German analyst Janis Kluge’s count. The dead no longer need persuading.The money has not vanished. It has been reassigned. Russia’s draft 2027 federal budget gives “national defense” 17.1 trillion rubles — 35% of all spending. Social spending — pensions, maternity benefits, veterans’ payments — gets 7% less than planned. The Finance Ministry expects a 2026 deficit of 7.3 trillion rubles, nearly double the budgeted 3.8 trillion.Even the living soldiers must wait. A draft Defense Ministry order would push December pay for troops outside the war zone into January 2027 — the first such delay in at least 18 years. Units fighting in Ukraine are exempt. The men with rifles get paid on time.Where regions cannot cut the dead, they cut the vulnerable. Arkhangelsk moved 40 million rubles from foster parents’ pay to war payments. Tula raided support for orphans and poor families. When money runs short, there is the street. In Omsk, relatives say men are snatched off sidewalks, beaten at a recruitment point, and forced to sign army contracts. Omsk, incidentally, halved its coffin money. The region takes the man off the street and pays the family half.The living pay, too. Since Oct. 1, families in three regions are refused child benefits if money flowing into their accounts exceeds twice their official income. The Labor Ministry wants the rule nationwide on April 1, 2027. On the same day, a government bill would move 6.6 trillion rubles of pension savings belonging to some 71 million people into a “long-term savings program” — automatically. No one has yet said how to opt out. In Russia, April Fools’ Day is not a joke. It is an effective date.Russians know the routine. The funded part of their pensions was frozen in 2014 as a “temporary” measure and has been extended ever since. Full compensation for Soviet-era savings, which the government itself puts at 66.8 trillion rubles, has been postponed every year since 2003. Russians hold about 67 trillion rubles in bank deposits, by Communist leader Gennady Zyuganov’s count. He denies wanting them seized. Soviet depositors were promised compensation, too.Then come the bills. Value-added tax rose to 22% in January. Utility tariffs rose again on Oct. 1, having politely waited until after the September Duma elections. Now the Construction Ministry wants a surcharge to fix pipes the old tariffs were supposedly paying for. St. Petersburg is cutting up to 15% of public-sector jobs, schools included, while its officials raise their own salaries. In the Irkutsk region, one district is laying off 37% of its administration. Otherwise, another district head explained, there will be no money even for the lights.The kitchen tells the same story. Chicken, long Russia’s cheapest meat, rose 37% wholesale in a year, Kommersant reported. For New Year’s, the Fish Union says pollock and herring roe may partly replace red caviar.Russia’s professional patriots have found the culprit: pizza. Vitaly Borodin, known for filing complaints against celebrities, wants it banned, starting with school cafeterias, because Italy arms Ukraine. He calls it “soft power in a cardboard box.” His list of authentic Russian dishes includes echpochmak, a Tatar and Bashkir pastry. Bashkortostan again. Borodin warns that pizza leads to Halloween. He is behind the times. On Halloween night, Moscow police detained two teenagers dressed as a banana and a tyrannosaurus and made them take off their costumes.A state that cannot pay its soldiers on time can still afford to listen. In Moscow classrooms, interactive whiteboards carry a module that records lessons at a server’s command and uploads the audio to the city, Mediazona reported. An earlier version was called “Agent for audio recording of a lesson.” The current one is called “Agent ensures the conduct of the lesson.” They did not remove the microphone. They removed the word.The war no longer stays on television. It interrupts it. In late October, a regional broadcast of Putin’s meeting with the president of Equatorial Guinea caught the guest thanking his host for “what you are doing to protect African countries, especially in the face of —” A missile alert for the Tula region finished the sentence.The war also comes home. In St. Petersburg, a former math teacher returned from the front in August. He is now accused of killing his 2-year-old son and the boy’s grandmother with a hammer.OPINION: IRAN CHEERED TRUMP’S MIDTERM LOSS. IT MISREAD WHO STILL HOLDS THE WHEELWhen reality refuses to cooperate, television recasts it. In late October, with first lady Melania Trump’s mediation, Russia and Ukraine held fire long enough to evacuate civilians from occupied Oleshky. Newsmax’s Alex Salvi, on the scene, counted 11 buses heading to Ukraine and four to Russia. Rossiya 1 aired an “exclusive” of freshly evacuated residents. One tearful heroine, Ukrainian media monitors found, had appeared in Russian media at least five times and left months earlier. On the state-owned Ukraina.ru, Ukrainian-born commentator Vladimir Skachko says much of Donbas’s industry will not be restored; many plants “will disappear.” The same outlet mocks Zelensky as a “peresident,” a president who overstayed his term. Putin has been in charge since 1999.Russia’s state can count bears. It can count every ruble that lands in a family’s account. It can record every word spoken in a classroom. What it will not count is its dead — or what they cost. The families are doing that arithmetic themselves, one cut payment at a time.Emzari Gelashvili (emzargelashvili.substack.com) is a San Francisco–based geopolitical analyst and columnist who monitors Russian-language media. From 1996 to 2008, he held senior positions in Georgia’s Ministry of State Security, Ministry of Defense, and Ministry of Internal Affairs, with a counterintelligence career focused on Russian and Iranian intelligence operations, and he was a member of the Georgian Parliament from 2008 to 2012. His work appears in Newsweek, the Hill, the Washington Examiner, RealClearDefense, and RealClearWorld.