Distrusting Z-Patriots, Putin Is Replacing Russian Volunteerism With Terror

Through centralization, re-Sovietization, and reopening the gulags

The special military operation was supposed to be short and victorious. It has been neither, and now civilian volunteer support is collapsing. “Donations are very scarce, people are fed up,” Elena, a volunteer fundraiser in Kursk Oblast, tells The Insider. “When you see the end of the road, it’s much easier to keep going than when you don’t know how much farther it stretches.” Russians are increasingly giving up. “At the start, we thought it would all be over quickly, so people were more willing to donate. But now there’s no end in sight, and you’re constantly asked to give more. Few are willing,” she says.

Elena is one of four Russians who talked to reporter Valentina Matrenina. All of them say that donations have dwindled. Peace negotiations have inspired exhaustion. Corruption has worn away the patriotic shine that the Russian military had enjoyed. “This year I finally quit the volunteer movement for good,” Ruslan, a uniform supplier, says. “I don’t want to deal with it anymore. I’ve had enough.” He used to send troops whatever they said they needed. His breaking point came when “the fighters I’d sent nearly a hundred thousand rubles ($1,240) blew it all that same day in a bathhouse with prostitutes.” Of course, none of this means that Russia will stop the war.

Meanwhile, in Ukraine, volunteers still make up a vital portion of civilian air defenses. They cook meals for troops and arrange caravans of non-military aid. A large Ukrainian diaspora collects donations from around the world to supply everything needful from flashlights to thermal camouflage. To be sure, war exhaustion is real. Morale is still high in Ukraine, though. We can tell because Ukraine still exists. If Ukraine was experiencing the same collapse in volunteerism as Russia reportedly is right now, the war — and Ukraine — would already be over. The real question is how Russia will continue the war without any voluntaryism at all, and of course the very Russian answer will be terror.

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Pokrovsk And The Gambler's Fallacy

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The drone war defines the battlefield in Ukraine, but the two sides have diverged in their drone doctrine, and the role of voluntary civilian participation is the most stark doctrinal difference.

Russia’s Ministry of Defense was “simultaneously monopolizing its control over Russian unmanned systems procurement processes by raising new state-affiliated procurement organizations and restricting Russian non-state volunteer organizations’ operations on the frontlines,” the Institute for the Study of War reported last December.

Decentralization and greater degrees of independence have given drone operators on both sides of this war advantages in the extremely rapid evolution of combat techniques and in the offense-defense race between drones and electronic warfare (EW) systems. The Russian MoD’s centralization and restructuring efforts may degrade the effectiveness of Russian drone operations and slow the Russian unmanned systems innovation cycle.

A new Center for Unmanned Systems and Technologies had “delivered more than 30,000 drones and more than 4,000 electronic warfare systems to the special operation zone” by December, and had “united 200 military startups” in a “special technologies cluster,” according to Andrei Bezrukov, who leads the new cartel. “The goal of the CBST is to help the state build an effective policy for supporting innovations in the sphere of military technologies and unite those who are engaged in this in the form of private design bureaus and companies,” War Gonzo reported. ‘The people's defense industry’ had to get out of the “garage,” Bezrukov said.

‘Rubikon’ units consisting of drone operators were created to support the infantry in the attack. Two-thirds of Russian troops must support every infantryman in the attack. The creation of Rubikon units reduces the number of soldiers using drones in the attacking formation. Disbanding specialist groups required the deliberate sacrifice of expertise, because this is Russia, after all.

“The Russian military command reportedly began increasingly committing drone operators and other specialists such as signalmen, engineers, and medics in assault operations starting in August and September 2024, which resulted in the deaths of several Russian specialists,” ISW notes. “The Russian MoD’s centralization and restructuring efforts may degrade the effectiveness of Russian drone operations and slow the Russian unmanned systems innovation cycle.”

This approach has answered the Ukrainian creation of a separate military branch, the new Unmanned Systems Force (USF), but on the Russian model of bloody, centralized inefficiency. During May, six months after a change that Russian milbloggers expected to take at least six months, Telegram channels started expressing their concerns that the upgrade to DJI Mavic 4 drones is leaving Russian units “trapped” with obsolete Mavic 3 knowledge, diminishing spare parts, and fewer ways to modify them.

Whereas the Mavic 3 is “the main workhorse” of the Russian Army, its Chinese manufacturer has stopped producing or supporting the older model. While there are still Mavic 3s lost in fields, or hoarded in supply closets as damaged units, all to be cannibalized for spare parts, “everyone understands that this will only delay the inevitable.”

“There is no spare parts database” for Mavic 4, so “initially, repairability will be non-existent, which means there will be more drone ‘losses’,” Russian Mirror World 2.0 writes. Ukrainian electronic warfare defenses will be more effective. “There is no firmware for Mavic 4,” either, “which brings us back to the situation of 2022, early 2023, when a drone could be ‘stolen’ by the simplest substitution of coordinates (spoofing).”

Russian industry cannot provide alternatives across the range of small UAVs (s-UAVs), especially when it comes to expensive reconnaissance drones. Units that lose them must sometimes wait “and sit, sucking a paw for a month or three” begging for replacements. The deep reconnaissance problem is made worse through “the training of operators (this is not a Mavic, which almost anyone can master the basics) and the lack of spare parts.”

Compared to Ukraine, “the military bureaucracy is much more monolithic and knows how to defend its own historical monopoly,” another Russian milblogger observed yesterday. Ukraine’s comparatively weaker military instituions, on the other hand, were more willing “to form military-civilian structures parallel to the General Staff and the Ministry of Defense — such as, for example, the Unmanned Systems Forces — or to transfer some military functions to other security agencies (as happened with the SBU).”

These “parallel structures” are “rather modest in scale and numbers,” but “became one of the key pillars of the Ukrainian defense capability,” Atomic Cherry writes. Whereas “the [Russian] Air Force turned out to be extremely incompetent in the war of unmanned systems” despite flying weapons being their reason to exist, the Ukrainians have promoted competence into command, no matter where it comes from.

For example, look at the units responsible for “deep strike” on the territory of the Russian Federation — the [14th Separate Unmanned Aerial Vehicle Regiment]. It is easy to assume that the subject of long-range air attack weapons is handled by a former Air Force officer, isn't it? But no, the 14th regiment was organized by an officer... of the Special Operations Forces. A person who has nothing to do with the war in the air — but nevertheless ensured very serious results (not only the destruction of the oil refinery, but also work on Russian military warehouses; regular strikes on fuel trains — also the work of this unit). A professional saboteur and infiltration specialist turned out to be more competent, flexible and understanding of the situation than “classic” specialists trained (formally) to operate in this environment.

Rather than a “special technologies cluster,” Ukraine has decentralized production across the country. Ukrainians use 3D printers with imported rotors, motors, chips, and batteries to build combat drones in basements and garages. For at the same time ISW was taking note of Russian reorganization last December, a soldier with the prototyping unit of the 241st Territorial Defense Brigade told Business Insider that “most funding is from volunteer help, by donors” and “the flow of cash from civilian supporters is keeping his men alive” with drones. His “unit also receives cash from Americans, often from military veterans willing to chip in anything from lunch money to $15,000 each.”

“When we have government or defense ministry funds, we try to buy regular things like mortars, shells, all connected to ammunition.” Coffee shops in Kyiv feature QR codes where shoppers can donate a few bucks for drones. Telegram influencers promote drone donations. Altogether, civilian volunteers have sent hundreds of thousands of small aerial drones to units at the front. Standing up the USF has not detracted anything from the existing system.

All of the nonprofits that send s-UAVs to regular units at the front (examples here and here and here and here) are still humming along. The civilian volunteer infrastructure is still supporting regular soldiers using s-UAVs in regular units. In this way, USF units act like a divisional artillery element, providing more resources to the point where a corps command wants them, but with minimal disruption to the unit-level resources that are already in the fight. The Ukrainian model enhances combat capabilities by combining effects where the Russian model destroys capabilities to centralize them.

Note as well that this same divergent model of drone procurement applies to the electronic warfare systems that suppress radio-controlled s-UAVs as well as drone signal detectors that give early warning of their approach. A global network of Ukrainian nonprofits and international fundraisers grew up around these aspects of the battlefield very early, and that community is still thriving. Units frequently make videos to thank donors for these items.

Unmanned ground vehicles (UGVs) are the emerging frontier of drone combat, and the contrast between the two systemic approaches could not be sharper. Whereas Russia was the world leader in UGVs before 2022, today Russian industry is not innovating or producing them in large numbers like Ukraine is.

Here is a video from April in which Paul Lewandowski, a US Army MP captain and combat veteran of Afghanistan, congratulates his community for helping to fund the creation of Targan (lit. ‘cockroach’). Essentially a storage bin on wheels, it comes in different sizes for different loads. Because s-UAVs and fiber optic drones have made the last 20 miles to the battlefront too dangerous for manned vehicles to operate in, UGVs are becoming essential for resupply, reinforcement, rotation, and casualty evacuation.

“According to Ukrainian media reports from March, the Ministry of Defense plans to deliver 15,000 ground robots to the battlefield by the end of this year — a severalfold increase compared to the previous year,” Politico reported last week. “Some brigades also independently order ground drones from manufacturers using donated funds from civilians — a practice that has become common in Ukraine.” As Lewandowski explains, when the units buy this equipment with their own money or crowdfunding, creating an income stream for the manufacturer beyond their direct government funding, production scales up faster.

An instructor with the 3rd Assault Brigade says that “more than 90 percent of all unmanned ground vehicles on the battlefield are currently used for logistics, with the rest deployed for assaults and other operations.” However, this will likely change as Ukraine replaces men with machines in counteroffensive operations by 2026. A combination of ground and air drones turns out to be very efficient at clearing Russians out of their defensive positions.

“I believe this ratio will become more balanced in the future,” he told me. The instructor gestured toward a robotic system in the workshop of the Killhouse Academy, which is equipped with a Mark 19 automatic grenade launcher. “This variant is also capable of providing direct support in assault operations,” he said. The robot can support troops with precise fire at ranges of just over a mile.

Within Russian formations, volunteers provided most of the communications gear in 2023. They still do, along with all the office equipment, food, medicine, water, uniform items, boots, helmets, body armor, generators, batteries, and other sundry supplies of war, including Mavic and FPV drones. But the top complaint among Russian milbloggers today is the command crackdown on vehicles. In one elite unit, “the company has two UAZ ‘loafs’ [vans] and one UAZ-Patriot [pickup truck],” writes the Philologist in Ambush.

Neither the Ministry of Defense nor the state provided any of the above. Bought by the company personnel at their own expense or received from humanitarian workers. Serviced with spare parts, gasoline, lubricants and rubber also at their own expense. In connection with the latest idiotic requirements and bans on movement in rear areas on transport without military license plates, they decided to put one “loaf” on military registration and the balance of the unit in order to receive the coveted black license plates. The process is not fast. Especially considering the factor of the eternally drunk gunman. There is also a “buggy”. Made to order. Paid for with the personal funds of the soldiers. All the accompanying equipment is also on the shoulders of the “common fund”.

This is the unit infrastructure which, until 2025, had relied on Elena and Ruslan as civilian auxiliaries and facilitators. Its natural home was the Russian reserve system of Cossack battalions, which were formalized into the MoD mobilization system in June. With the volunteer spirit of 2022 now vanished from Russia, the troops are on their own. Signup bonuses are spent on logistics and combat survival instead of being saved or invested or sent home to family.

Military service becomes less attractive all the time to the kind of men that armies normally want to volunteer. Thus the quality of the Russian recruit has suffered, most notably of all when prisons became recruiting centers. Now, the police station is the recruiting center, as men arrested for any cause are allowed to choose service in the special military operation in lieu of a kangaroo court and prison.

Year-on-year, Russian recruitment by the regular armed forces declined by more than half in the second quarter of 2025. Overall, however, Ukrainian military intelligence says the Russian MoD is exceeding their recruitment goals with an unsustainable flood of cash. This summer, a geographic ‘caste system’ has emerged in which some regions reduce enlistment bonuses while others increase them.

Then there are the informal units. According to Mariya Y. Omelicheva, “estimates suggest that irregular formations account for between one-third and one-half of Russia’s deployed ground forces in Ukraine, a staggering proportion by any modern standard.” Based on Ukrainian intelligence figures, she estimates that “irregular forces make up roughly 39.25 percent of Russia’s deployed force.”

These units are the most disposable, so they offer the highest bonuses and then take the lead in ‘meatwave’ assaults. Russian citizens remain okay with this arrangement because contractniki, soldiers who fight for pay, do not evoke the same sympathy as conscript soldiers, who are ostensibly barred from serving in the SMO. The MoD has effectively outsourced the attrition of the Ukrainian battlefield, creating “a flexible, high-turnover force that bolsters operational capacity without triggering politically sensitive conscription or exhausting the regular military.”

Z-Patriots are the only Russians who terrify Putin. All of their energy has been harnessed to the war machine, or else sent to the front in sacrificial assaults, or else marginalized on Telegram. Normal Russian citizens are apathetic, no longer interested in the war, anxious at the economic effects but unwilling to take action against the regime. Meanwhile, there is a corresponding labor crisis in Russia. Putin is solving it the same way.

After two decades in which they had been stripped of their infamous facilities, the most famous being Lefortovo, the FSB, formerly known as the KGB, is getting its jails back. Ostensibly, this is to crack down on terrorists, spies, and other enemies of the state, all as conveniently defined by the KGB, er, FSB, by making them into convicts.

One use of all these new internees is free labor. “Uralvagonzavod, the largest tank manufacturer in the country, failed to hire enough workers, even the unskilled, and has no choice but to use convicts to fill the gap,” the Center for European Policy Analysis (CEPA) reported in January 2023. “Hundreds of prisoners from a penal colony in the Sverdlovsk region will soon be sent to Uralvagonzavod.” This June, the same writers reported that the Duma is reopening the gulag archipelago.

The FSB is anticipating a steep rise in repression. The explanatory note to the legislation states: “With the beginning of the special military operation, the number of suspects and [those] accused of treason, confidential cooperation with a foreign state, international or foreign organization, and espionage has increased significantly.”

The rubber-stamp legislation provides for new facilities across Russia, as well as “the creation of a new and in-house logistical system for moving detainees between these facilities” using “special carriages that can be attached to passenger, mail, and baggage trains” as well as “vessels and aircraft to transport convicts and prisoners in pre-trial detention. These inmates would be escorted by a newly established FSB guard service.” And then put to work on making things for Russia.

Serfdom has returned to Russia. It has taken the form of workhouses that, for example, fill in as addiction rehabilitation centers. According to Walk Free, an NGO that works to eradicate modern slavery, there were nearly 1.9 million slaves in Russia before the war. They work in all sorts of jobs: manufacturing, construction, nursing homes, laundries, undertaking, whatever will make someone a millionaire through free labor. Formally, these slaves are ‘volunteers’. In Russia, to be a volunteer is to be a slave.

For more skilled work, especially technical work, Russia imports the labor. Doctors, drillers, welders, factory workers, miners, food processors, and migrant farm workers come to Russia, working even at “shift sites” in the Arctic. They are filling in for missing Russians, but at far lower wages. This has been problematic, since Russians are frankly quite racist. Central Asians and Africans did not work out. “Companies are dissatisfied with the quality of execution of orders and the low productivity of these personnel. However, the demand for Indians and Pakistanis remains,” reports a Russian news site.

North Korea sends to Russia the most experienced and professional specialists, who are considered valuable in their homeland. These workers work quickly and efficiently. They also keep the place clean. While other visitors use the construction site as a toilet, the North Koreans do not allow this. They strictly follow schedules and discipline. After work, they relax quietly, without getting drunk.

Of course, the enslaved always feel differently. Six North Korean workers who managed to escape Russia tell the BBC they endured “slave-like conditions” at hard labor, “confined to their construction sites day and night, where they are watched by agents from North Korea's state security department. They sleep in dirty, overcrowded shipping containers, infested with bugs, or on the floor of unfinished apartment blocks, with tarps pulled over the door frames to try to keep out the cold.” But they don’t get drunk, don’t make trouble, work “like robots”. Slaves.

These trends will outlast the war, indeed they will prolong the war before outlasting it. Eurasianism, the underlying philosophy of Putinism, is globalization with Russian characteristics. Putinism is a vertical power structure, not a philosophy, and the FSB is its most favored security organization, the Russian ‘deep state’.

One sad inheritance of Soviet times is broad social distrust of civic organization in Russia. A rare exception are the druzhiniki, essentially police auxiliary volunteers. Now the Duma is going to “institute the druzhiniki on a federal level and allow them to impose fines for failure to obey their orders and provide compensation for injuries suffered while on patrol,” The New York Times reports. “Legislators have even debated the possibility of allowing the volunteers to carry weapons like batons or stun guns.” They will have police powers, but without the police training, or responsibility.

Like Russian history in general, it just gets worse. “More than three years after Russia launched its full-scale invasion of Ukraine, the country’s far-right landscape is evolving, as the state increasingly seeks to co-opt and control such activism, with [Russkaya Obshchina] serving as a prime example of the strategy,” Italian journalist Giovanni Pigni reports from Russia.

Immigration produces social tensions, but the ethno-nationalist organization is safely co-opted by the state. “The group promotes ‘traditional values,’ supports the war and carries out law enforcement activities — sometimes alongside police, sometimes independently — effectively creating a parallel policing structure with unofficial state backing.” The state controls both the immigration and the vigilante backlash to immigration.

In fact, Russkaya Obshchina is increasingly “taking control of Russia’s streets and imposing their version of nationalist, pro-Kremlin order as police leave for higher salaries fighting in the war in Ukraine,” reports The Wall Street Journal.

Videos on Russian social media show members intervening in everything from alcohol-fueled disputes between neighbors to cases of violence and harassment on the frozen streets of Siberia. Group members sometimes detain people they accuse of petty crimes until the police arrive. But they often go beyond the scope of typical police work, raiding the homes and workplaces of migrants, breaking up private gay parties and forcibly registering people for the military.

Volunteerism is otherwise absent, especially in the Russian armed forces. One milblogger writes that according to an unnamed combat commander, “frontline brotherhood has become a marketing myth.” The Russian “way of war” is “rot, greed, and hypocrisy.” Everything is for sale at inflated prices: food, spare parts, even useless junk. “Here, on our section of the front, real enemies sometimes sit not behind the gray line, but next to it. With a machine gun, with the same uniform, with the same flag on the chevron. Only, in their souls — zero honor.” The Russian Army never had supply sergeants, just slaves.