The Man Situation

Why women are starting long-distance relationships with soldiers-and why they aren't working out

Online chats and groups where women can start romantic relationships with soldiers have been flourishing in Russia since 2022. “Ever since mobilization started, I can’t even look at ordinary civilians!” says one member’s profile. Here, we explore what it’s like to look for a life-partner in the trenches and why women are willing to stake their futures on men they’ve never met.

A Capricious Damsel

Groups for women wanting to meet soldiers existed before the war, but there was a lot less interest in them than today. Now, the most popular of these groups, which is on the social media site VKontakte, counts 45,000 members. In December 2021, it got about 100,000 page views per day. One year later, in December 2022, that number exceeded one million. There are dozens more groups like this on social media, each with between 5,000 and 30,000 members.

In all of these communities, people wish each other not a “good” evening but a “peaceful” one. They congratulate one another with the holidays devoted to the Russian Navy, the special forces, communications officers, tank soldiers, ground troops – the list is long. They ask questions such as “What does your ideal relationship look like?” and “Could you forgive someone who cheated?” They complain: “Why are such daring and courageous men unable to express themselves normally with women? After all, when something is left unsaid, it’s hard to forget and move forward.” They share stories of unsuccessful attempts to find love, or boast of happy endings. They quote rah-rah-patriotic and sentimental poems along these lines:

We say it’s so hard for us
To wake up at eight in our homes.
But is it really so easy for them
To drift off to the buzzing of drones?

Most personal ads posted in the groups are short: a photo and a few telegraphic sentences. “Liza Petersburg 32.” “Taira, 53. City of Yaroslavl. Adult children. Single.” “Olga, 43, a capricious damsel, seeking a normal relationship.”

Women sometimes specify that they could only find happiness with a soldier. For instance, Kseniya from Ryazan wrote: “I want to meet a good Russian military man. Why military? Because I have close ties to the military, and I want the man beside me to be on the same wavelength.” But most women, it seems, are just trying to find happiness wherever they can. Tamara, for example, is a member of a dozen dating groups including “Plump Girls” and “Dating after 30.”

“You’re The Moron”

Vladimir, Tamara’s sweetheart, whom she had seen only on video calls though they’d been communicating for nine months, ended up in hospital in Pskov in June 2024. Tamara lives in Pskov Oblast, so she took time off work and went to see him. She arrived in Pskov in the evening and stayed with her niece. She was awake all night imagining how the meeting would go.

“The time came. They weren’t letting him out of the hospital – he and his friends had to escape across the fence, right in their pajamas. It seemed beyond romantic at the time,” Tamara says. “And here’s where the saddest and most offensive part of the story begins. We got to the rented apartment and I set the table, thinking his buddies would have some nice home cooking and then leave, and we’d be left just the two of us. But it didn’t go like that. One of his friends pulled me aside and asked, ‘Is it true you’re going to do it with all of us?’ After that I went up to that Vladimir and without a word – honest, without a word, he’d stopped existing for me – slapped him in the face, and left.”

Tamara wept for days, like she hadn’t done since she was 19. She blocked Vladimir’s number, but he called her a few times from other people’s phones, saying she was “the moron, couldn’t take a joke.”

Tamara is 52. She has a kind-hearted expression on her round face, short hair, deep wrinkles and expressive brown eyes and she is holding a slim cigarette. She met Vladimir on a dating app, she says – she wasn’t specifically looking for a soldier. They realized within a few days that their relationship had a prequel: Vladimir had seen Tamara back in 2002, in a prison. She was working there and he was doing time for theft. He went to war straight from jail, too: he’d been serving a new sentence, again for theft.

“It didn’t bother you that this man had a record?”

“But why would it bother me?” Tamara seems puzzled.

“It bothered me!” Oksana, Tamara’s sister, interjects. She’s been sitting next to Tamara during our conversation and throwing in the occasional judgmental remark. For months, she had disapproved of her sister’s choice of romantic partner.

“And if it had been for a violent crime, like Article 105?”

“105 is murder – and it can involve all sorts of situations. But if it had been pedophilia or rape, then yes, of course it would have bothered me.”

Tamara says Vladimir is two years younger than her and divorced, with grown children. But in fact he’s 45 (not 50, as her “two years younger” would have implied) and, judging by comments on social media, after he fell out of touch with his friends in 2023, they were getting updates about him from his wife. We were unable to find out whether or not he was divorced when he met Tamara.

Abusing our Russians

Tamara recalls that when the president announced the beginning of the “special military operation” (SVO in the Russian acronym), her 18-year-old daughter was totally distraught. And her nephew “sat, kind of smiling but not smiling – it wasn’t clear what was going on with him.” Tamara’s nephew is the same age as her daughter; she raised him from a young age and thinks of him essentially as her own child, as she does her 32-year-old niece.

“I said, ‘Kids, your mother, and your Aunt Oksana, and your grandmother – we survived the ’90s, we survived the war in Kyrgyzstan, quit wailing, we’ll get through it.’ I mean, my sister and I came to Russia from Kyrgyzstan in October 1991. Oksana jumped right into marriage, she was 18 and he was 20, but he turned out to be a jerk. I started raising her first daughter when she was nine months old. She wants nothing the f*** to do with her. I also raised her second child,” Tamara explains.

When her son (the nephew) was conscripted into the army, Tamara begged him not to sign on for anything more than his regular service. “But he spent six months on the border,” she said. “He was under fire, he’s got two medals, I’m very proud.” He didn’t sign a contract, and so he came home.

Tamara’s answer to the question of what Russia is fighting for is disjointed and confused.

“I’m in a chat group with my classmates, there are 28 of us: some in Kursk, some in Belgorod, or Texas, or Alabama, or Israel, or Belgium. And all of us, all 28, fled the war [in Kyrgyzstan]. And now what? We’re again confronted with it in Russia. The girls in Belgorod and Kursk Oblasts, they got hit by it first. And for what? It’s as if there was no point in fleeing the war back then? What’s it all for?”

“And did you find an answer for what it’s for?”

“Because they’ve been mistreating our Russian population there since 2014. To be honest, I wasn’t paying much attention before 2022. Yes, something was going on there, but I never thought about it. But when people showed me, I became a believer.”

Tamara became such a believer that she started volunteering: she wove camouflage netting, donated to the front, collected cans for trench candles. She even wanted to go to the front. “I can take a pistol apart and shoot a machine gun. I got good marks when we covered weapons in school. I applied, but they sent me out of the recruitment office with a kick in the butt.”

“I’m still proud.”

It didn’t even cross Tamara’s mind whether it was worth starting a relationship with a man who could die at any moment, and she wouldn’t even be notified. “I was proud,” she explains. “And I’m still proud. All my relatives fought.”

When she first met Vladimir, he said he was in the hospital. They chatted “about everything and nothing” for three or four hours every day. If Tamara was walking down the street and Vladimir started a video call, she would walk and show him the city. He had lived there before, so he knew the area.

During his hospital stay they had long and frequent calls, but the frequency decreased when he returned to the front. Then he started going on combat missions and communication became erratic.

“I got a call one night: ‘We’re off, I’ll write when I can.’ Then a lot of time went by. A few days later, the message I’d been waiting for: ‘I’m fine. Please write, don’t disappear.’ So I wrote every day, telling him what was new, asking for advice – he almost never replied. He would be out of touch for a week or two. I cried my eyes out. I cried like an idiot. I understood everything. He was there. I – a grown, independent, successful woman – had, in essence, fallen in love like a snot-nosed little girl. It’s terrifying when someone is out of contact for two or three weeks – you feel like climbing the walls, throwing a tantrum. But I have good support. Any time I call my sister, she says to me: ‘Why are you freaking out, you dummy?’  My coworker: ‘Valya, he’s there, understand?’ And when he would call I would hear explosions, it was like thunder, and he’d say: ‘Oh, don’t worry. Everything’s wonderful.’ He always reassured me. But what if he’s killed, and no one tells me? I thought about that a lot. But I have good friends. They’d say: ‘Don’t worry, we’ll find out where he is and how he’s doing,’” Tamara says.

Every time Vladimir managed to call or write, he said he would come visit Tamara on his leave, that they would be together and that they had a wonderful life ahead.

“But I don’t get it, what did you need him for?” Oksana, Tamara’s sister, says, inserting herself into the conversation.

“It just worked out that way. Nice girls are always attracted to bad boys,” Tamara explains.

“One thing I’ll say: you can’t change a person’s nature,” Oksana continues. “These criminals, they always make things out to be wonderful so they can take advantage of you. And what the hell was it for? You get hold of a woman and then you’re ready to let others share her just like that! Jesus Christ!”

“Nine months less a day”

In any case, Tamara didn’t give up on finding a soulmate. In August she joined a chat group for meeting soldiers. After a month of conversation, one group member – who had gone to the front as a volunteer and gotten wounded – suggested that they become a couple.

“And bang! He writes, ‘I’m coming to see you.’ Sends a photo from the train: ‘Pick me up at 5A.M.’ Then five amazing days. Then I saw him off. And, all of a sudden, the group admin, she’s his friend’s widow, writes to me asking my ring size – Petya wants to know. He’s crazy, completely crazy,” Tamara says. “We just started chatting at the beginning of October. Less than a month had gone by since the new relationship began.”

Tamara posts a photo on social media of herself and Peter, her new sweetheart, with the caption, “The man I love.”

Later, she shares news: her sweetheart has proposed. She uploads a video that Peter must have asked the train conductor to take: a man in uniform holding white carnations exits the carriage, limping slightly, and walks up to Tamara, who’s there to greet him. He gets down on one knee and opens a red velvet box. Peter and Tamara now live together in her home. 

“He has a concussion, an arm held together with metal, and shrapnel in his hand, a bullet in his ribs, his leg is shattered, and his spine as well – the entire right half of his body hurts. But they won’t release him from service until the SVO ends. He’s attached to a unit in Voronezh, but physically, he’s with me,” Tamara says. She adds that she knew what she was signing up for and that she’s not afraid of challenges in life when it comes to her beloved.

As for Vladimir, in the end he told Tamara he was very sorry and asked if he could write to her sometimes – not romantically, just as friends. So he’s been sending her short messages every week or two: “Hey, I’m fine.”

“You don’t regret those nine months?”

“No. I looked forward to his calls. I was happy. Nine months less a day – that’s how many days of happiness?”

“No one leaves his family”

“Why were you attracted to this man in particular?” I ask Yelena. “What was special about him?” She’s 33, divorced and raising a six-year-old son.

“The fact that he even showed up for our date was the first good sign,” she says. “Men these days are looking for girls in the next building over – they don’t want to put effort in or go anywhere. I don’t know what it’s like in other cities, but it’s like that in the provinces. Guys have gotten really lazy – if I’m 10 or 15 kilometers from them, they won’t even travel to meet me. If you suggest meeting in a café, they say, ‘Why should I pay for you?’ When you ask why they’re showing up for a date empty-handed, they’re all, ‘If I bring flowers for everyone I’ll be out of money.’ Some are so out of their minds, they even ask, ‘Can I come live with you?’ I have a tiny Khrushchev-era apartment, it’s too small for a family. Then some guys have no interest in a relationship – they just invite you over to drink wine. Those kinds of losers.”

Yelena rarely goes on dates – a few times a year. Usually it’s because she has no one to watch her son: she moved to Samara from a small city and has no relatives here, and has only recently started making friends.

I found Yelena in a dating group for meeting soldiers. She admits she wasn’t looking for a soldier exclusively, though she fully supports Russia in the war.

Yelena says she thought on February 24, 2022, “we’ve finally started doing something… We couldn’t go on living like that. Everyone there has had enough. Our soldiers there since 2014 have had enough, the civilian population has had enough. You’ve got to draw the line. I think we’re doing a very good thing. Many people are dying, of course, but you’ve got to fight fascism. Our own Kievan Rus’, from which everything originated, had turned against us for some reason. I think you have to take things all the way. If there’s going to be general mobilization, then we’ll all go. It’ll be like the Second World War.”

Yelena has a special respect for military men – she has always thought that they value family higher than anything.

“They may cheat, of course, but no one leaves his family, because who is going to be there for you when you come home on leave? Who is going to clean up after you, cook, raise your children? Only a wife – a mistress won’t do that. Everyone completely gets this,” she argues.

She considers her ex-husband to be an exception to the rule: he, an officer, left her for his mistress.

Yelena met her new boyfriend on a regular dating site right before New Year’s 2023. Andrei told her right away that he was a soldier, currently on leave. Yelena wasn’t fazed: “I’m a fearless person in general. Many people even call me crazy because I moved with a young child from a small city to Samara.”

Andrei gave her roses, which won Yelena over – “lots of men can’t even bring chocolates.” For once she was able to leave her child at home, but he was the only man to ever suggest, “If you’ve got no one to watch him, you can bring him along.”

“Overall he’s an interesting guy, grew up in our region. I can’t say anything in particular. But we talked about lots of different things, even about cars – I’m a well-rounded person,” she says.

Andrei’s leave ended after the New Year, and he asked, “Will you wait for me?” Yelena thought he was “the most decent man she’d known” and agreed. They wrote to each other, and Andrei warned her if he was going to be on a mission and offline.

“I have no official relationship to him – he could get killed and I wouldn’t find out. Of course that’s scary, it goes without saying,” Yelena admits. Andrei wrote to her once a week, sometimes more.

“I would open the app to see if he was online. Sometimes it would say he was but he actually had bad internet and couldn’t read or reply,” Yelena says, describing the sorts of things she has to go through. “But I never had bad thoughts – it was one of those things where you have to be 100 percent positive. My friends said, ‘It’s the SVO, it’s happened that someone’s disappeared for months at a time and turns out to be alive.’ No one tried to change my mind – everyone gets what the situation’s like now with men. Out of all those losers he’s the obvious winner.”

No more fairy tales

Six months later, Andrei asked Yelena to marry him. There was no romance – he just said, “We’ve got to make our relationship legal.”

“I look back now and think it wasn’t for real. Maybe there was a mission and that put him a certain frame of mind. But when he wrote, he was serious. I was thrilled, of course, like all girls would be. But we didn’t discuss any details, because I knew we had to do it in person, and he didn’t have leave at the time. I’m a grown woman – I get that it’s all just talk,” Yelena says.

She also understood that “it’s silly to sit around for years waiting for a man you’ve seen once in your life.”

“I’m not 20 anymore – I don’t believe in fairy tales. He said, ‘I’ll come on leave in May.’ Then he said it was moved to June. Then, in July, 'they’ve pushed everyone’s leave back.’ Then in July or August he said they’d canceled all leave. By then I realized this guy didn’t want a relationship with me.” 

In September she had vacation time scheduled, and Andrei said, “Why don’t you come to me here?” Yelena asked if he’d changed his mind about marrying her, and he replied that he hadn’t.

“I said, I’m not going to visit someone if I don’t even understand what kind of relationship we’re in,” Yelena recalls. “How about I come and we make things official?” Then the excuses started: ‘But they’re sending me far away, and I want us to get married when I’m on leave.’ It became clear to me that he simply didn’t want a relationship.”

After that conversation, they stopped communicating. “We didn’t argue over it; we didn’t make a fuss. We just both came to our own conclusions.”

“Andrei isn’t a bad guy,” Yelena explains – primarily, it seems, to herself. “I think at first, he wanted emotional support, for someone to be waiting for him. Because men always find it comforting to have a girlfriend back home. But after spending time in these groups and hearing what the soldiers say – both the ones who volunteered and the ones who were drafted – I realized that they don’t want a relationship, because it’s all long-distance. They’re all excited at first, then they realize, what’s the point? I’m here, she’s there. Maybe he felt uncomfortable saying it out loud. Many guys say that, while the SVO is on, they won’t be looking for anyone.”

“I waited like an idiot”

Alina, unlike the other subjects of this story, already knew Mikhail before the war and agreed to wait for him – though they had only seen each other in person twice. They met in the summer of 2021. Alina was 17 then and had finished 10th grade. Mikhail was a couple of years older and had already been to college. Then, after completing his mandatory military service, he signed a contract to keep serving.

“Before Ukraine, our relationship was pretty vague,” Alina recalls. “It was on again, off again: first we’re together, then we’re not. Our situation was never clearly defined. Before going to Ukraine, he ordered me a big bouquet of flowers and said, ‘I love you, wait for me, I’ll come back and we’ll get married.’ He spun this yarn and I sat with the yarn like an idiot and waited for him.”

Alina has a hard time articulating her thoughts about the Russian invasion. “I think war is bad, and I don’t want anyone to be dying anywhere – I want it to end quickly. My parents are very much on Russia’s side. And I’m on the side of everyone living in peace.”

After Mikhail left for the front, he was out of touch for a month. It was hard for Alina. “I went overboard watching videos put out by Ukrainians. I saw one where they hung a soldier up, beat him up and then killed him. I found it terrifying – what if it was him? I saw Misha in every soldier.”

After that Mikhail called her, then disappeared again. Alina kept up with dozens of groups sharing news from the front. That’s how she saw a post with his name in it. The original update said that enemy troops had been destroyed and their documents and maps seized. One photo showed a personnel list: a small red book open to a page with information on Mikhail, among others. Mystery individuals started writing to Alina after this, sending photos of corpses and saying they were Mikhail. “I don’t know how they found me,” she says. “My name is in Chinese on all the social media sites, and he doesn’t use his real name.”

Alina thought he was dead and became an emotional wreck. But then Mikhail turned up and called her, after which he got in touch sometimes once a week, sometimes once a month. The constant anxiety led Alina to quit school, and she wasn’t able to graduate.  

She remembers spending this time simply sitting and staring at the wall. She didn’t go out. Sometimes she cried. Then she realized she had to make a change. She found a job and things got easier.

Alina says her mother wasn’t worried that she’d left school. She wasn’t a bad mother, Alina adds, pointing out that, as a child, she had “everything she needed and even got to take art classes.” At home, she says, “everything was fine” – except that her mother drank and her stepfather tried to sexually abuse her.

“My stepfather came on the scene when I was eight,” she recalls. “Mama started drinking heavily, though she didn’t drink at all before that. It got to the point where I called her an ambulance, and my great-grandmother wanted to call social services. Mama would be drunk for days at a time. When I was 16, she got loaded with a friend and went somewhere; my stepfather must have gotten drunk as well, and at 5A.M. he started trying to get me to screw him. Thank God my boyfriend lived nearby and came to get me. I told my mother and she said, ‘That’s all lies, you’re making up bulls***.’ She’s with him to this day.”

Mikhail was given leave in the summer and came to Alina’s workplace with flowers – she had a job as a salesperson in a lingerie store. 

“We went to a hookah bar together. It was evening, there was some kind of celebration with fireworks. The sounds triggered him and he started shaking all over. He decided to see me home, so we got into a taxi and he said, ‘Do you want to see this funny video from Moscow?’ And he showed me a video of him with a prostitute. Some half-naked girl was dancing in it. At first I didn’t understand what was happening. Then I asked why he’d hired this prostitute, and he said, ‘Well, all the guys were, was I supposed to sit by myself?’ I thought, ‘All right, they all hooked up with prostitutes, and him too, whatever.’ Then I thought, ‘No, that’s not okay.’ And he said, ‘I want to f*** you, but I never use a condom.’ Word for word. And I said, ‘Umm... f*** off, dude.’ And he said, ‘No, you f*** off.’ ‘For real? But I love you!’ In the end I really did f*** off,” Alina says, describing their encounter. For her, the relationship had been based on her being worried for his life and euphoric about his infrequent phone calls, she says.  

“When he went to Ukraine, it seemed like he was scared and needed some kind of support, and decided he loved me, and so he behaved super well” she says, explaining his actions. “But when he came back, he thought, what did he really need me for?”

In the cards

“When we first met, it was like his energy hit me and I got a really bad feeling,” says Valeria from Altai Krai, describing her emotions during her first in-person meeting with the man she had spent almost six months waiting for. “It jolted me back from the threshold, and I was overcome by shaking and terror. As if this man permeated with war had given me a gut punch.”

Valeria, a 24-year-old bank employee, had met Alexei in July 2022, on a regular dating app. He said he was also from Altai Krai. Valeria is clear that she never set out to date a soldier specifically.

“We chatted, called and wrote to each other, sent videos and voice messages. Then he said he was a contract soldier. Not on the front line, but somewhere close. Maybe if he’d said that right away, some doubts would have crept in. But there seemed to be a connection developing between us, and I found him interesting. Not that I’d been looking for a guy like that, but okay, it’s fine. I even felt sort of proud: a strong man in that sort of profession. A long-distance relationship wasn’t an obstacle. I work a lot, I wasn’t really looking for dates, so it was fine,” she recalls.

Alexei treated her extremely well, to the degree he could from a distance: he would send her flowers for no reason. If Valeria told him she was going to get a manicure, he would send money “for her little fingernails” without being asked. 

“Such a gentlemanly attitude is hard to come by these days, and he was attentive and took an interest in me: how are you, did you eat yet, are you dressed warmly? He would even order me food. He wanted to wine and dine me, but couldn’t do it in person,” she says.

Valeria remembers that once, when she was a child, a fortune teller predicted she would be with a military man who would carry her in his arms. Then Alexei wrote to her one day: “I like you so much, I’m ready to carry you every day in my arms.” So Valeria thought: “If it was in the cards, then it’s probably fate.”

At first they were in touch every day. Then Alexei told her he was being sent closer to the front line, and Valeria could hear “how everything thundered” during their calls.

“It was terrifying. What if it’s our last conversation? For a while I was drinking chamomile tea with glycine. At one point he was out of touch for two full days. I was anxious like anyone would be – I really liked him. But I tried to think good thoughts, tried to believe. I tried to be encouraging – I wrote, ‘Call me, I’ll answer even in the middle of the night, whenever you need me.’ The calls were five minutes long, but we had already gotten close, so that was enough. It didn’t scare me that we wouldn’t see each other for a year. I had this idea that I’d go to meet him. Now I wouldn’t do it, that was before the scales fell from my eyes.”

Army Brain

Alexei showed up on his leave right before New Year’s 2023, and things went wrong immediately. Valeria had been chatting with a kind and caring person, but the man who came to her “seemed dictatorial and abusive.” 

She now thinks that Alexei “was just looking for a girl who would wait for him and satisfy his needs when he came home, ravenous.”

“On the first date he was very insistent, in terms of intimacy. A hungry guy. Maybe someone else would be up for it right away, but that’s not me. After that, things got more tense and hostile. He took off his mask. The threats and rules started: ‘Tell me exactly where you’re going,’ ‘What did you say to me?’ There was none of this when we were chatting online. I didn’t think he was like that. Super unpleasant. Army brain, they call it. Everyday rudeness: the door hit me because he didn’t hold it, or he was rude to a cashier. A different person entirely. I realized I couldn’t build a relationship with him,” she says.

Even so, they put one more week into trying to be a couple. “We had some emotional ups and downs, even in the space of a week. First we were splitting up, then we weren’t. We did break up, then on the next day he wrote to me, drunk: ‘Let’s try again, I bought tickets, come meet my parents, I’m going to marry you.’ The next day: ‘I changed my mind, stay home.’”

In the end they had a bad breakup. Alexei started “calling me the most awful names” and added up how much money he’d spent on her, demanding she return it. Valeria says she blocked him because interacting with him was too frightening. For a while she was afraid Alexei would stalk her – after all, he knew her address – but it didn’t happen. Then she saw new photos on his profile with other women in them and realized he “wasn’t suffering.”

Now, looking back, Valeria believes Alexei “had a very narrow perspective on life that didn’t extend beyond the army and military matters,” and that he had drawn her in with his attentiveness and chivalry.

“I’ve put it all together: that the fortune teller, heaven forgive me, told me how he’d act. He charmed me somehow with his courage and attention, it seemed he’d be even better in real life,” she recalls.

After the affair with Alexei, Valeria wants nothing more to do with soldiers. If she meets a man and he tells her he’s a contract soldier, she ends the conversation.

The SVO windfall

Posts from the man’s point of view with complaints about “gold diggers” – or, conversely, from the woman’s, about money-grubbers – appear regularly in military-focused dating groups. Many commenters believe, however, that these men might be fraudsters posing as soldiers, while in fact leading ordinary civilian lives on someone else’s dime.

Valeria didn’t set out to find a soldier for the financial benefits, though she admits Alexei helped her with “a small sum.” How much exactly, she won’t say.

Alina says she wasn’t thinking about money at all. “I didn’t even know how much he earned and was never interested.” Mikhail’s financial investment in Alina added up to two bouquets of flowers. 

When asked about the financial component of her relationship, Tamara is clear to state that she is “financially independent, never asked for anything and never will.”

“We never talked about money,” she says. “When he landed in the hospital, I called the local volunteer girls and sent them 4,500 rubles of my own money so they could buy and bring him what he needed. Then, when we met in June, he paid me back.”

Yelena prefers to differentiate true soldiers from “SVO-men who will be returning to civilian life.” She says that you don’t earn a lot in the military, so money doesn’t factor into her choices.

“Only certain categories in the military earn good money: pilots, paratroopers, sailors,” she says. “The others don’t make a lot. There’s an SVO windfall right now, but that’s temporary. Guys who sign up for the SVO are raking it in, but that’s all temporary. After it’s over, the career military men will return to their bases, and the SVO-men will go work at grocery stores or something. For the most part, the SVO-men are all married, sick in the head, or just dating because they’re bored. I want to start a family – I’ve got no interest in short-term riches.”   

This article was originally published in Russian in Cherta.