Privatizing War

One of my first interviews in Ukraine was with Artem Denysov, the founder of Veteran Hub, the largest private NGO that supports former military personnel. A military psychologist with a clear-eyed perspective on the conflict, Denysov wasn’t troubled at all by the fact that, after a decade of military operations in the east and years of full-scale war, the public efforts to support veterans remained a joke — with Soviet-era laws that still offer obsolete entitlements such as telephone connections and new radios for wounded soldiers. “States are inherently incapable,” he told me. “Better to leave things in the hands of private, resourceful citizens.”

One of the most striking examples of the privatization of the war effort can be found across Kyiv’s metro stations. It’s a marketing campaign by the Third Assault Brigade, the primary military wing of the far-right Azov movement. The ads feature striking images of beautiful young women embracing or gazing longingly at burly soldiers in full tactical gear. The campaign has been criticized for its sexist depiction of women, but even more striking is the fact that it was privately funded and produced by the military unit itself. The website it links to does not belong to the Army or the Ministry of Defense; instead, it’s the Third Assault Brigade’s private portal, used for recruiting members, raising funds, and sharing videos and other promotional materials.

Since volunteers can choose which unit to join and conscripts can request a transfer through the official military app with just a few taps, there is fierce competition among Ukrainian units to attract the best and fittest recruits. The Third Assault Brigade is just the most prominent example of a military unit effectively leveraging a marketing machine. Nearly every unit attempts to do the same.

Market mechanisms also shape the demand side of recruitment. The higher a civilian’s usual wages, the less likely they are to be recruited, due to both formal and informal exemptions. Salaries are often regarded as a barometer of an individual’s utility to the economy — and, by extension, to the war effort. At a certain point, the taxes a person generates are considered more valuable than their potential contribution on the battlefield. In Ukraine, several proposals have been made in parliament to formalize this approach by explicitly linking exemptions from mobilization to the pay scale. Such efforts have faced criticism, but this perspective — those who earn more shouldn’t be mobilized — remains widely supported among elites and economists.

Military units also compete for donations. Nearly every brigade in Ukraine covers part of its needs through civilian donations or alternative means, such as soldiers’ private wages and personal funds. Military shops, which supply everything from winter jackets to bulletproof vests, have become a booming business in Ukraine and people set up temporary tent shops at crossroads and villages near the front line.

Money is needed for everything — from clothing and drones to rent. Soldiers often have to cover their own accommodation costs, and housing near crowded front lines can be as expensive as in downtown Kyiv. Tuareg, a forty-four-year-old lieutenant commanding a drone company in the 92nd Brigade, whom I met in Kupyansk on the northeastern front, told me that nine out of ten drones in his unit are either donated by civilians or purchased with their contributions. One effective way to secure more, he explained, is by demonstrating the unit’s success in using them. A video of a drone striking a Russian tank, shared on the brigade’s Telegram channel, can generate thousands of dollars in new donations. This creates a strong incentive for Ukrainian military units to carry out actions that can be filmed and showcased to the public.

A unit with well-trained drone pilots equipped with the latest equipment is also at lower risk of being sacrificed as riflemen in the trenches. However, the Third Assault Brigade — with its sleek website, well-appointed private recruitment centers, and fully equipped soldiers — is an exception. Most brigades are composed of mobilized men in their forties who receive minimal training and are poorly equipped. These units can barely afford any advertisements and often rely heavily on charity. Some cannot even do that, as they lack the manpower to navigate the bureaucratic hurdles required to secure donations.

I visited such a unit in the spring, near the Vovchansk axis in the north — an artillery company of the 57th Brigade. The soldiers told me that only one member of the company was older than their equipment, a self-propelled howitzer built in 1976 in nearby Kharkiv. They had to purchase most of their clothing and raise funds to cover gas and repairs for the company’s vehicles.

State Intervention and Its Limits

In such a situation, one might expect the state to be desperately scraping the bottom of the barrel for resources needed at the front lines. Deep cuts have indeed been made to everything that could be sacrificed, with education bearing the brunt, while indirect taxes have been increased. Yet, for the rest, the government has adopted a strictly neoliberal approach to the war — albeit one heavily subsidized by foreign countries, which now cover around half of Ukraine’s total budget.

There has been no widespread nationalization, no conscription of workers, and no rationing of consumer goods — as so often was the case in the past during long, attritional conflicts, when states grew into giant war-planning machines with broad powers of intervention. In Ukraine, the defense sector has grown from around 120,000 workers in 2014 to 300,000 today — a considerable increase, if not particularly remarkable after a decade of war. It consists of roughly five hundred companies, one hundred of which are state-owned, accounting for about half of the total output. However, private companies often take center stage, such as the military clothing brand M-TAC, which outfits President Volodymyr Zelensky in his iconic olive-green fatigues.

Meanwhile, the government pursued peacetime privatization plans and continued cutting red tape — or at least claimed to — in the interest of making Ukraine more attractive to international investors. The tax system was only reformed a couple of months ago. For nearly three years of a war widely described as existential for the country, taxes remained at prewar fiscal haven levels. Economists in Kyiv, along with many others, argue that more intrusive interventions would simply drive a larger portion of the economy underground or push it abroad, thereby undermining revenue generation efforts.

It’s more than just an application of the infamous Laffer Curve; the real concern is that, given current national and especially international constraints, this laissez-faire approach may be the only viable option. If the state raises taxes too much, or if it begins forcing luxury shops to turn off their lights or starts nationalizing their generators in the name of the war effort, sales will fall and businesses and their clients would simply relocate abroad, depriving the government of vital fiscal revenues. At the same time, foreign investors and international partners might criticize such measures as authoritarian or anti-market, potentially damaging the international relations Kyiv depends on for survival. Many would agree with this perspective.

War in the modern age has often been waged by the poor, while the upper classes have found ways to avoid military service. However, what is happening with the war in Ukraine is different in both scale and intent. The current system is defended as rational and purposeful, rather than merely accepted as an inevitable evil.

Corruption is widespread in the military and procurement offices. Wealthy war profiteers involved in prominent scandals face criticism. However, the media and many Ukrainians tend to blame the government and the “Soviet heritage” much more often than the current system.

Shared Constraints

Russia remains less dependent on international networks and far more authoritarian, allowing for greater freedom for the political leadership to remold the economy and society. Ukrainian sociologist Volodymyr Ishchenko has written about a Russian “military Keynesianism,” in which the state’s drive to fund the war has led to a genuine redistribution — moving resources from the top of society to the bottom, particularly to defense sector workers and those employed in the so-called “special military operation.”

And yet the differences between the two countries’ ways of war are more quantitative than qualitative. Russian brigades also run advertising campaigns, compete for donations, and seek to market their military actions. It was a Russian private military unit, the Wagner Group, that even went so far as to mutiny against the government, briefly — though only temporarily — breaking the state monopoly on violence.

Meanwhile, the Russian economy is carefully managed to remain as civilian and consumer-oriented as possible. Elvira Nabiullina, governor of Russia’s central bank, and Russia’s top economic leaders respond in a manner similar to Kyiv’s economists when discussing how to manage the economy during wartime. Those Russian elites advocating for full societal mobilization and the implementation of a total war economy have largely been sidelined — at least for now. Even as Vladimir Putin frames the war as an existential and civilizational struggle against the collective West, the lights must remain on in Moscow’s Tsum, just as they do in its Kyiv counterpart.

If further proof is needed, the war in Ukraine, according to preliminary studies, is the first in a century where ethnic Russian soldiers are underrepresented in the list of casualties, while poorer and less-educated minority groups are overrepresented. While this conflict is, in many ways, more “Russian” than either World War II or Afghanistan, it is also the one where the comparatively more prosperous ethnic Russians are paying the least, proportionally. Or, as a Ukrainian POW camp guard put it to me, “I’ve never seen anyone from Moscow here.”

The truth is that both Russia and Ukraine operate within partially shared constraints and contexts. Whether we are discussing ways of funding underequipped units, efforts to prevent capital from fleeing the country or the power of sanctions to block the export of quasi-military goods, none of the participants can completely escape the iron rule of late capitalism and globalization.

The war, which began with Putin’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine, marks a historical first. This is neither a counterinsurgency operation against a rebellious militia nor a conflict between poor nations with fragile institutions. It is the first genuine clash between two quasi-peer leviathans of the late-capitalist era.

The last time we witnessed a conflict of such proportions, the imperial and totalitarian states of the first half of the twentieth century waged all-encompassing wars that mobilized entire populations, brought new groups into the labor force, and generated huge expectations for changes in the social model. However, these life-or-death struggles also led to destruction unseen both before and since, pushing nations to the brink of societal collapse.

In contrast, neoliberal, late-capitalist societies, when confronted by peer nations for the first time, have waged war striving to preserve their civilian economic and social structures as much as possible. They have fought with one eye on the battlefield and the other monitoring investor sentiment and capital markets. It may sound cynical, but this attitude has also resulted in a war that, while still awful and bloody, has been much more limited than similar conflicts in the past.