In October 2023, Sergey Khandozhko, a 40-year-old Russian man from a small village in Bryansk oblast, married Elena Sokolova, an employee at a military enlistment office in a neighboring village. The very next day, Khandozhko signed up to fight in Ukraine, despite having zero military experience, and was killed at the front four months later. A few days after his funeral, Sokolova claimed widow’s benefits amounting to at least 3 million rubles (around $37,000), even though she never shared a household with her late husband or had her marital status changed in her passport. Khandozhko’s brother, Aleksandr, successfully disputed the marriage in court, which ruled that Sokolova had entered a fictitious marriage “to obtain potential financial benefits in the event of the husband’s injury or death.” Aleksandr also claimed that Sokolova abused her authority at the draft office to expedite the process of getting Sergey into military service, did not visit him when he lay injured in a hospital, and was living with another man.
Sokolova is, by all appearances, a “black widow”—a newly emerged slang term for women who ingratiate themselves with unmarried soldiers, especially those returning from the front for a rare leave of absence. After quickly marrying the soldiers, black widows see them off to the front line, where they are very likely to be killed in action, given Russia’s macabre tactics of sending expendable human waves into the “meat grinder,” as Russians call the front in Ukraine. When this happens, black widows cash in the grobovye—which roughly translates as “coffin money,” the common code for government payouts to the families of fallen soldiers. The sums can go as high as 13 million rubles (around $160,000), which represents generational wealth in poor regions where salaries hover around 30,000 to 40,000 rubles a month. Lonely, marginalized men like Khandozhko are ideal targets, because their widows won’t have to share the grobovye with other family members.
While it’s impossible to know the scale of the phenomenon, Khandozhko is not an isolated case. There are dozens of similar reports, sometimes including court cases, from various regions: Ulyanovsk, Ryazan, Samara, Saratov, and Russia’s Pacific coast. In Tomsk, a real estate agent was sentenced to community service for advising clients to marry a soldier from the “special military operation” to make the down payment on a property. Such motivations can easily be put into action on social media, where groups such as “We don’t abandon our own! Date a soldier” on Vkontakte with tens of thousands of subscribers facilitate connections between soldiers and civilian women.
All of this is a symptom of deep societal rot: a predatory opportunism exacerbated by the war. Black widows aren’t acting alone—it’s an emerging cottage industry with many players on various levels. They include the women themselves, some of whom are nurses in military hospitals or, like Sokolova, clerks in draft offices; civil registrars fast-tracking bogus marriages; and corrupt police officers leaking information about lonely men without obvious heirs, the primary targets for these scam schemes. Because the average lifespan of Russian assault infantry after arriving at the front, according to loyalist war reporters, is about 12 days, the next victim is already around the corner. In one notorious case, a black widow from Nizhnevartovsk married four men in quick succession, all of them then killed in action. Before being exposed and charged with fraud along with her three co-conspirators (including one member of the local police force), she had managed to rake in 15 million rubles (around $185,000), or up to 15 times the local average annual salary. Although there is a long tradition of widows’ and orphans’ benefits during wartime, only in today’s Russia has an individual soldier’s death turned into an attractive source of wealth and advancement.
The black widows phenomenon cannot be understood outside Russia’s wartime economic transformation. The conflict has set off a massive redistribution of state resources to the military, including through cuts to social spending. The wealth gap between regions with a concentration of defense industry (like Kurgan) and the poorest regions (like Ingushetia) was extreme even before the war; now, more and better-paying jobs in arms and munitions factories have further widened the gap. In the poorest regions, the combination of high unemployment and poverty-level wages means that many men see their own likely death on the battlefield as the only way to provide for their families.
For women in these impoverished regions, marriage to a soldier and the high chance of receiving death benefits is not simply an opportunity, but often the only realistic path out of generational poverty. A single death payment of, say, 10 million rubles is equal to almost a lifetime of working in a low-paid job. This is not merely opportunism; it’s a rational survival calculation in a system that has weaponized poverty. The staggering losses Russia has been incurring in its war against Ukraine, with at least 145,000 Russian men confirmed as killed in action and many more severely injured and thus forever unable to work, have exacerbated a steep demographic decline that was already pronounced during the COVID pandemic. This demographic collapse creates perverse incentives: Widows and other relatives see military death benefits as compensation not just for loss, but as insurance against regional economic extinction.
Black widows are only the most cynical and visible manifestation of Russia’s deathonomics. There is now an entirely new middle class of Russians whose prosperity is fully dependent on perpetual war: Soldiers and their families receiving signup bonuses, decent pay, and staggering death benefits; local businesses benefiting from this infusion; and the criminal networks targeting these nouveau riches. But this ill-gained wealth is neither sustainable nor transformative: According to Rosstat, Russia’s Gini coefficient in 2024 was just about unchanged from 2021, the last pre-war year. The income of the richest 10 percent is a staggering15 times that of the poorest 10 percent. (This multiple is about eight in Brazil, six in the United States, and three in Norway.)When the government offers life-changing sums for death amid its demonstrated indifference to deep poverty and demographic collapse, it creates a macabre marketplace where human life is commodified and death becomes an investment strategy.
The emerging war-economy class reveals the Faustian bargain President Vladimir Putin has struck with peripheral Russia. Military spending temporarily masks decades of neglect, providing social mobility through carnage. But what happens when the war ends, one way or another? The Kremlin recognizes these looming threats but remains paralyzed in addressing even the immediate symptoms. Traumatized soldiers returning to their impoverished regions, finding low-wage jobs at best and their wartime bonuses depleted, could trigger a vast social crisis. These disillusioned and bitter men could join the ranks of the emerging opposition of Russians whose lives have been negatively affected by the war or who are unhappy about the extremely wasteful ways that it’s being waged.
The very state that created this crisis is now puzzled as to how to ameliorate it. The black widows issue is now openly discussed on national television, and the Russian parliament is struggling to combat it with legislation. There is little the state can do if the marriage was formally legal and death benefits have already been paid. A judge can annul a soldier’s marriage to a black widow, but the man is already dead, and the money has been transferred. The result is that black widow marriages remain a moral transgression rather a prosecutable crime. The far-right (and implausibly named) Liberal Democratic Party of Russia has proposed harsh prison terms of up to 10 years for sham marriages driven by economic motives, although such a motive is difficult to prove in a criminal court.
But the true horror lies deeper than individual criminality. What the black widows phenomenon reveals is a state-engineered moral catastrophe: Russia’s entire periphery has been deliberately impoverished—and then offered a single path to survival, the commodification of death. Women marry soldiers to collect their death benefits because there are no alternative futures for either member of the couple, whether real or sham. Organized criminal networks exploit war deaths because the system has made death more profitable than labor. This is not individual depravity but institutional corruption—the Kremlin’s deliberate construction of a system where the only winners are those whose wealth accumulates with each corpse. You cannot fix this with laws or moral appeals; this is the systemic rot of a nation where the state itself has become a predator feeding on its own citizens’ deaths.