This article was originally published by Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty and is reprinted with permission.
On May 21, Alfred Galimov returned to the apartment he shared with his girlfriend in Naberezhnye Chelny, a city on the Volga River in Tatarstan, following a day of military exercises in the regional capital, Kazan.
A member of the Alga battalion, a unit made up mainly of men recruited in Tatarstan, the 34-year-old was scheduled to be sent back to the war in Ukraine any day following a five-month break.
That evening, he texted a relative to ask for 200,000 rubles ($2,250), an amount nearly four times the average monthly salary in the region. It was an odd request for a soldier about to leave to war.
The next morning, Galimov was found hanged in his bathroom, an apparent suicide.
He left no note, but a relative who spoke to RFE/RL said Galimov was apprehensive about returning to the front. He may have wanted the money to bribe his way out of the service, she said.
“I could see that he did not want to return to the war,” the relative said, speaking on condition of anonymity due to the sensitivity of the subject.
As the death toll mounts 16 months after Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine, which has turned into Europe’s biggest armed conflict since World War II, many surviving soldiers on both sides have been left traumatized by the constant shelling, mangled bodies, and fear of imminent death. In Ukraine, many civilians are also affected.
While reports of Russian soldiers dying by suicide have so far been few, experts say that may be in part due to attempts by families and the military to keep them under wraps — and that it’s just a matter of time before mental health issues among fighters and veterans of the war become a serious problem.
“Extended deployment times, inadequate mental health care while home on rest, with no end in sight to deployment, along with poor service conditions and high casualties — I think it’s quite likely this pushes some to suicide,” Dara Massicot, a senior policy researcher at the Rand Corporation, a U.S.-based think tank, told RFE/RL.
“I do think it’s likely that there will be a major crisis with Russian veterans of this war,” Massicot said.
Indefinite Service
A delivery driver with a long-time partner, Galimov was barely getting by when he volunteered in the summer of 2022 for a four-month tour in Ukraine with the Alga battalion. His family protested, but the offer of a wage that that may have been as high as 195,000 rubles a month ($2,200) won out.
At the time, a few months into the full-scale invasion, Russian forces were slowly gaining ground in eastern Ukraine, moving beyond the territory in the Donbas that Moscow had helped anti-Kyiv forces seize in a war that broke out there after the Kremlin fomented separatism in 2014. State TV exaggerated the Russian military’s success while downplaying its significant losses, leaving many soon-to-be volunteers with unrealistic expectations of the war.
Two months into Galimov’s deployment as a communications officer, the Ukrainian military launched a powerful counteroffensive, smashing through Russian forces in the northeast and south and retaking considerable amounts of territory.
Suffering from a lack of manpower, Russia responded by announcing a massive call-up and temporarily prohibiting contract and volunteer soldiers from leaving service. Galimov’s four-month tour turned into a six-month stint that was now just the first leg of indefinite service.
He returned for a break in January a different man, his relative said.
“The war greatly affected his psyche. He became short-tempered. I felt that he was withdrawing into himself, but I never thought it would end in suicide,” she said.
In text messages with his relative, Galimov made it clear that he came face-to-face with the horrors and deprivations of war. She said that following an attack by Ukrainian forces in an undisclosed location, he helped evacuate wounded and possibly dead members of his battalion, for which he was awarded a medal for bravery.
During Galimov’s service, Alga fought in areas where the fighting was intense, around the regional capital of Kherson in the south and Lysychansk in the east. Ukraine recaptured Kherson in November, as Russian forces retreated to the east bank of the Dnieper River after months of heavy battles.
There have been rumors in Tatarstan that Alga, which means “forward” in the Tatar language, has suffered heavy losses in the war. Numbers are hard to come by — they are not released by the state — and RFE/RL has been able to confirm 20 deaths out of a force of about 600 soldiers.
In January, after Galimov had returned to Russia for his break, Alga was sent to Vuldehar in the Donetsk region, where they were routed by Ukrainian forces the following month in a vicious battle that reportedly left many of its members dead. Some of their bodies have not been found.
Even before that, members of the battalion were disgruntled with their conditions.
They complained in a letter in November that they lacked vehicles, communications equipment, winter clothing, footwear, and food supplies In the text messages to his relative, Galimov also complained about a lack of food, telling her that he at times had gone hungry several days in a row.
Two members who had joined the battalion around the same time as Galimov returned home without permission and demanded to be discharged for having fulfilled their original four-month contract. Their request was turned down by a Kazan court in April.
In March, a month after the bloodbath in Vuldehar, the Russian military filed cases against eight soldiers from Tatarstan for deserting the war. They had filed six such cases against soldiers from the region in all of 2022.
Vision Problems
Galimov suffered some loss of vision in one of his eyes after a bomb exploded nearby, his relative said. When he returned from the front in January, he sought medical attention. Though his eye condition did not improve, it was not considered serious enough to discharge him from service, she said.
Galimov told his relative that there was no point in trying to fake an additional injury because the military would still send him back.
It is unclear if Galimov suffered a traumatic brain injury (TBI) or post-traumatic stress syndrome (PTSD) from the bomb incident. A moderate case of TBI can lead to permanent ill-effects such as frequent headaches, loss of vision, and personality changes among other things.
A recent U.S. study found that the rate of suicide among U.S. veterans who had experienced mild traumatic brain injury, known as a concussion, was three times higher than the general population. For those with moderate and severe TBI it was even higher.
During his five-month break, Galimov did not receive any mental health assistance.
Russia has a grossly underdeveloped mental health-care system for veterans that could soon find itself overburdened, experts say.
In an opinion piece in The Economist in May, Massicot noted that, according to veterans’ advocates, Russia has 10 hospitals serving former military personnel and only one of them focuses on psychiatric care. That center has 32 beds.
“Nobody is working on this issue [of PTSD],” Boris, a 44-year-old from Russia’s Udmurtia region who suffers from the condition and was located in Ukraine’s Luhansk region from 2014-2019, during the Donbas war, told RFE/RL.
He said that PTSD will pose a more significant problem for Russian society following this conflict than in the aftermath of the Soviet Union’s Afghan war and the wars in Chechnya in the 1990s and 2000s due to the greater death and destruction experienced in Ukraine.
The United States in February estimated that almost 200,000 Russian soldiers have been killed or wounded in the fighting in Ukraine. That number has only surged since then amid continued intense fighting in Bakhmut and the recent launch of a Ukrainian counteroffensive.
Erik de Soir, a Belgian professor and specialist in psychological trauma, told RFE/RL that everyone who has been through violence will have PTSD. That includes not just those who felt the threat of death but those who witnessed brutality.
That puts the number of Russian fighters potentially in need of mental health care in the tens of thousands.
When he launched the full-scale invasion in February 2022, President Vladimir Putin expected a short, victorious war in Ukraine. Now, Russia is struggling to build or enhance facilities to help soldiers returning with psychological problems.
Russia this spring announced a pilot PTSD program for returning soldiers and said it plans to set up veteran-support centers in each of the country’s eight federal districts, Massicot noted in the Economist article. The centers are meant to help returning veterans find the physical and mental care they need as well as offer employment and legal assistance.
“It is too soon to say if this will cushion the blow to a health system that is already overwhelmed,” she wrote.
Galimov’s relative said his suicide came as a painful shock and brought sorrow that will not fade. But she said that for the family, his death differed from the deaths of others in the battalion.
“At least we know where his grave is. I can go visit him,” she said.
