“The Defense Ministry has a whole department for psychological rehabilitation, but no real work for the large-scale treatment of post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) is being done,” said a doctor specializing in drug dependence in Russia’s Rostov region, which borders Ukraine.
“But when a person sees all the horrors and filth of war -- limbs ripped off, open wounds, death -- a lot of them will try to mute them with drink and drugs. Otherwise, they would just go mad,” the doctor, who asked that his identity be withheld for fear of repercussions, added.
Although it will take a year or two before any possible crisis can be confirmed, military and public-health specialists who spoke with RFE/RL expressed concerns about a spike in drug addiction and its social consequences as tens of thousands of soldiers called up to fight in Russia’s war in Ukraine begin returning home.
It is not difficult to buy drugs.... And the commanders tend to turn a blind eye.”
In particular, addiction to synthetic amphetamines like mephedrone -- known in Russia as “salt” -- is already on the rise, according to the government’s own statistics. Mephedrone-related criminal cases have been reported in the Krasnodar region, Adygeya, the Moscow region, Kostroma, Kurgan, Chelyabinsk, and Perm since the beginning of June, most of them involving alleged trafficking.
Cases involving drugs also seem to be on the rise in the military, analysts told RFE/RL, in part because soldiers were not screened for drug addiction when they were mobilized. Many troops spend time in the eastern Ukrainian city of Donetsk, which has been controlled by Russia or Russia-backed separatists since 2014.
A Russian volunteer who helps coordinate humanitarian aid in the conflict zone, speaking on condition of anonymity, said that the conditions are ripe in Donetsk for drug use.
“It is almost a peacetime environment. There are many restaurants, clubs, and other places of entertainment,” he said. “It is not difficult to buy drugs. Soldiers arriving from the front line, particularly those who are able to get their pay in cash, take full advantage of this. And the commanders tend to turn a blind eye.”
Case Files
The number of drug-related cases passing through Russian military courts already shows an upward trend, according to an RFE/RL examination of the files of several courts in southwestern Russia, where soldiers from the Ukraine war are likely to face trial. The military court in Krasnodar, for instance, handed down one drug-possession conviction in 2020 and three each in 2021 and 2022. This year, however, there were three such convictions in March alone.
In most of the cases RFE/RL studied, the court reduced the sentence after taking into account the soldier’s combat experience and any decorations.
WATCH: Former Moscow policeman Maksim Zlobov turned in his badge after attending an anti-war rally following Russia's full-scale invasion of Ukraine in February 2022. He says he fled Russia in April after a new law was passed making it more difficult to avoid conscription. He joins the hundreds of thousands of others who have left wartime Russia to live abroad.
In April, the military court in the Stavropol region city of Pyatigorsk convicted contract soldier Aleksei Sokologorsky of purchasing 2 grams of mephedrone in the town of Kamensk-Shakhtinsky on the Ukrainian border. Although a conviction for “large-scale” possession normally carries a prison sentence of three to 10 years, the court sentenced Sokologorsky to 3 1/2 years of probation after taking into account a military decoration that he earned fighting in Ukraine.
In March, the military court in Rostov-on-Don, the capital of the Rostov region, convicted contract soldier Eduard Moiseyev of purchasing mephedrone for his personal use. Despite Moiseyev’s poor military record, the court took his Ukraine service into consideration and gave him the minimum punishment, a fine of 20,000 rubles ($240).
The same month, the Rostov court fined serviceman Aslan Dotdayev 30,000 rubles ($360) for possession of marijuana. According to the records, the drugs were found on him after he was detained by military police in a drunken state. The court concealed the location of his detention, which legal experts affirm is an indication the crime occurred in an occupied area of Ukraine.
In May, the Krasnodar court handed down a nearly three-year prison sentence to Vadim Bai after convicting him of failing to obey orders during “a time of mobilization and military action.” He allegedly refused to be transferred to the combat zone, claiming in his defense that he suffered from drug addiction. His relatives testified in court that he had undergone addiction treatment from December 2022 to January 2023.
'Already Dead'
Polish historian Lukasz Kamienski, the author of the 2016 book Shooting Up: A Short History Of Drugs And War, said the problem of drug addiction among soldiers has a long history. A 1973 Pentagon study found that as many as 15 percent of U.S. service personnel returning from Vietnam were addicted to heroin, Kamienski said. An even greater number were abusing amphetamines, such as Benzedrine.
For soldiers, such self-medication is often the only way of reducing the psychological burden of combat and the horrors of war."
In his book, Kamienski argues that amphetamine abuse may have been a contributing factor in some of the atrocities committed by U.S. soldiers against Vietnamese civilians.
“For soldiers, such self-medication is often the only way of reducing the psychological burden of combat and the horrors of war,” he said.
Many Soviet soldiers serving in Afghanistan in the 1980s developed heroin addictions, Kamienski added. There were cases of officers trading weapons and ammunition for drugs.
“Returning soldiers usually brought home with them a stash of hashish, heroin, or opium to maintain their habit for at least some time,” he said. “The large number of soldier-addicts increased the risk of related problems in Soviet society. The return of the soldiers led to the intensification of drug smuggling from Afghanistan and Pakistan into the Soviet Union.”
In April, the Russia-focused investigative news site The Insider studied the comments that the families of returning soldiers posted in closed chat groups on various social media sites.
“I’ve noticed that many of the boys that come back have changed a lot,” one person wrote. “The son of some friends of ours came back in early March. He is already dead of an overdose.”
