PROFILE: In a Russia Awaiting Martial Law, the Faces of Those Who Will Pay the Price

A Lifetime of Work Turned into a War Obligation

A forced conversion of a portion of private bank deposits into government war bonds is reportedly being considered to plug the budget gap. For the average Russian retiree, this means seeing a lifetime’s worth of savings transformed, overnight, into funding for a war they never chose.

This is not some abstract mechanism: it is money that people have set aside for their retirement, seized without their consent.

There are no words strong enough to describe the sense of betrayal felt by someone who discovers that their savings are being used, against their will, to finance the war that has already taken their son’s life.

When Work Becomes a State Mandate

Among the powers that martial law would grant is the ability to assign citizens to work in the defense industry. This is no longer a chosen job; it is a requisition of the labor force itself.

Workers who were manufacturing consumer goods yesterday would find themselves producing ammunition tomorrow, with no option to refuse, under threat of punishment.

A worker forced to manufacture the weapons that will kill his Ukrainian neighbors bears a moral burden that this regime will never bother to acknowledge.

1.4 million lives already lost or shattered

Russian casualties in the invasion of Ukraine are now estimated at approximately 1.4 million dead and wounded, according to United24 Media. Behind this staggering figure are surviving, traumatized soldiers who fear a new mobilization order or reassignment under martial law.

Voluntary enlistments have reached their lowest level in three years, a sign that even those who could still enlist are now refusing to do so.

When no one wants to enlist voluntarily anymore, it’s not a problem of insufficient propaganda: it’s an entire people who have come to understand, through personal experience, the true cost of this war.

Elections That Could Be Canceled

Martial law would allow the regime to cancel elections, impose curfews, and enforce total censorship. For Russian families who were still hoping to one day influence their country’s future through the ballot box, that door would close for good.

This is the ultimate dispossession: the deprivation of the citizens’ very voice, confiscated in the name of “national security.”

To
strip a people even of the right to vote to change their circumstances is to tell them that they exist only as a resource to be exploited, never as citizens whose voices should be heard.

Amendments That Affect People’s Lives

Draft legislative amendments concerning the Rosgvardia, published on July 20, entrust this force with the advanced preparation of personnel, facilities, and assets in anticipation of mobilization and martial law. Behind this administrative jargon lie the names, addresses, and files of ordinary citizens that have already been compiled.

Somewhere, a bureaucrat is already checking boxes on lists that will determine the fate of entire families.

The bureaucracy of repression is always the most terrifying: it reduces human lives to rows in a spreadsheet, checked off in advance by anonymous hands.

A Daily Life Already Made Impossible

The tightening of exchange controls mentioned among the additional measures would hit small business owners and entrepreneurs the hardest—people already weakened by a war economy on its last legs.

For them, every new restriction isn’t just a line in a report from the Ministry of Finance: it’s the potential closure of a family business, the end of a livelihood.

Every financial restriction decided in the Kremlin’s offices translates, somewhere in an ordinary Russian city, into an iron curtain coming down for good.

Six Trillion Rubles: An Abstraction That Takes on a Tangible Form

Russia’s budget deficit reached nearly 6,000 billion rubles ($76.9 billion) between January and June 2026, according to United24 Media, Reuters, and Meduza. In practical terms, this abstract figure translates into delayed wages, deteriorating public services, and pensions losing their value.

It is in the weary faces of ordinary Russians that this deficit finally becomes visible and tangible.

A six-zero number means nothing until you see it transformed into an exhausted face standing before a closed bank teller window.

When the government runs out of buyers, it turns to its people

On July 20, the Ministry of Finance indefinitely suspended its regular government bond auctions after four consecutive failures. When the market refuses to lend to a government, that government inevitably turns to the only resource it still controls: its own population.

It is this shift—from the free investor to the captive citizen—that worries observers the most.

A government that can no longer convince free investors to lend it money always ends up turning to those who have no choice but to comply.

The Welfare Fund Is Shrinking, but the Pain Remains

Russia’s National Welfare Fund has shrunk from more than $130 billion before the war to about $50 billion today, according to Reuters. For a war widower who was hoping for government support, this depletion of reserves means reduced compensation and broken promises.

Finance Minister Anton Siluanov himself acknowledged that “reserves are not infinite”—an admission that rings cruelly for those who have already lost everything.

Telling bereaved families that the state’s coffers are running dry is tantamount to announcing that even the sacrifice of their loved ones will soon no longer buy them any tangible recognition.

Leave Now, Before Travel Restrictions Take Effect

Faced with the prospect of tighter exchange controls and travel bans, some young Russians are already weighing their options for leaving, aware that the window to leave the country freely could close after September.

An entire generation is planning its exile—not out of ambition, but out of sheer fear of what lies ahead.

When an entire generation of young people begins to calculate how much time they have left to flee their own country, it is the harshest verdict a people can pass on their own regime.

Say nothing, so as not to have to take responsibility for anything

The Kremlin has not publicly confirmed these internal discussions, staying true to its practice of never confirming a repressive scenario until it becomes a fait accompli. This organized silence does not reassure anyone; on the contrary, it fuels a pervasive sense of anxiety in every Russian household aware of the rumor.

Living in uncertainty orchestrated by an opaque government is, in itself, a form of daily psychological violence.

Official
silence has never reassured anyone under an authoritarian regime: it merely adds the anxiety of uncertainty to the already very real fear of the coercion that has been announced.

Suffering That Never Justifies Aggression

It would be easy, when telling the stories of these Russian faces, to forget a fundamental truth: this suffering stems directly from a war of aggression launched by Vladimir Putin against Ukraine. The Ukrainians caught in the crossfire did not choose this either, and their people are resisting with a courage recognized by the entire world.

Recognizing the pain of ordinary Russian citizens must never be used to excuse the regime that inflicts it upon them.

Sympathizing with the collateral victims of a criminal regime never absolves that regime of responsibility: Putin remains solely responsible for every instance of suffering, whether Russian or Ukrainian.

A Necessary Reminder of Proportion

While Russia debates imposing martial law on its own population, Ukrainian families have been living under attack since the start of the full-scale invasion, without ever having had the luxury of an internal debate about their own survival.

This asymmetry must remain at the heart of any Western assessment of the situation: the aggressor can never be placed on the same level as the victim.

There is an absolute moral difference between a people subjected to coercion by their own regime and a people subjected to the bombs of an invader: the two must never be confused.

Human Vulnerability as a Strategic Signal

These faces of ordinary Russians, trapped in a system that exploits them, reveal a strategic truth that is essential for the West: Putin’s regime relies on a population that is increasingly exhausted, both financially and psychologically.

It is precisely this human fragility, documented in the daily lives of millions of Russians, that sanctions and support for Ukraine must continue to exploit strategically.

A regime that must exhaust its own people to continue its war is a regime on borrowed time, and the West would be wrong to ease up on the pressure at this very moment.

What the Regime Prefers to Keep Quiet

Every measure discussed behind closed doors by the siloviki has a human face that the Kremlin refuses to name: that of the mother, the soldier, the saver, the young person considering fleeing. They are the ones who will foot the bill for a war they never asked for.

A lesson that must be etched in our minds

As long as these faces remain invisible to the world, the regime will be able to continue imposing its coercion without accountability. Naming this suffering—without ever excusing those who inflict it—is the bare minimum of moral clarity.

Behind every upcoming decree lie specific faces, specific lives, and specific pain: never forgetting this is, in itself, a rejection of the dehumanizing logic of the regime that inflicts it.

Signed, Maxime Marquette, columnist