When Ilya Rusinov returned to the Russian work force after rehabilitating a vertebra damaged in the Ukraine war, his first job was teaching in a school.
But he had also launched a side project, a patriotic club he called Zveno, or “Squad,” that provides military training for different age groups, including teenagers. After struggling at first, it found growing demand for its training sessions, including from instructors at similar patriotic organizations. Mr. Rusinov eventually left his teaching job to help run Zveno full time.
Almost three years after a mortar shell blew a hole in his back, Mr. Rusinov, who fought as part of the Wagner mercenary group, is one of a growing group of veterans whom Russian officials claim are being rewarded with an enhanced standing in society — speaking at public events, school lectures and with local news outlets.
It is part of the Kremlin’s very public effort to elevate veterans to leadership positions, offering business opportunities and some forgiveness on loans, all while priming society to accept and appreciate them.
Today, veterans address school groups as young as kindergarten age and give basic weapons training to students, which since September is a mandatory part of every curriculum starting in eighth grade. Billboards proclaiming the heroism of soldiers line major roads, and the Kremlin has made a show of appointing veterans to top jobs.
An hourlong daytime TV show on state-owned Rossiya 1 called “Ours” features breathless coverage of veterans. Some give live performances of frontline ballads, others tell of their “heroism” on the front.
To be sure, veterans’ re-entry into society can be rocky. A lingering stigma endures. Badly injured or visibly traumatized soldiers are a rarity in public. Psychological struggles are left undiscussed, and there is a lack of mental health support. Some of the programs created for veterans are charades and do not lift up rank-and-file veterans, critics say, while Ukrainians have alleged that some of those being lauded were involved in war crimes.
Analysts say Moscow is attempting to learn from the experiences of the Afghan and Chechen wars, when traumatized veterans with access to weapons returned to a society that questioned why they had been fighting and looked down on them as killers.
Mr. Rusinov heard about those days from his father, who fought in Afghanistan for the Soviet Army. At the time, the Kremlin was trying to minimize society’s awareness of how many soldiers the country had deployed, and just how many of them died — sending the dead home in zinc coffins.
“My father told me that they came back, nobody really needed them and, in general, they were pushed aside and viewed with skepticism,” he said of the soldiers returning from Afghanistan. “You went and fought, you know a lot of things, but nobody needs you.”
“Now the situation is completely different,” said Mr. Rusinov.
The withdrawal from Afghanistan is still seen as an embarrassment to Moscow. But this time, the Kremlin has sought to burnish the image of veterans in public life.
One of the most trumpeted components of its plan is a postgraduate program, “Time of Heroes,” that aims to foster a generation of warrior leaders.
The Kremlin has billed Time of Heroes as a pathway to remake the country’s elites — reducing the presence of oligarchic businessmen and elevating patriotic veterans. The program, which mixes management and leadership courses for veterans with the opportunity to intern in administrative positions, attracted more than 44,000 applicants for its first 83 spots. It is accepting a second round of applicants.
“The elite are those who serve Russia, not those who lined their pockets in the 1990s,” President Vladimir V. Putin said when he announced the creation of the program last February. “In the future, Russia can be handed over and entrusted to people like the current heroes” of the war in Ukraine.
Mr. Putin announced his candidacy for a fifth term as president in a carefully choreographed public appearance in which a veteran asked him to “finish what he had started.” The veteran, Artem Zhoga, originally from Ukraine’s Donbas region, later joined Time of Heroes in its inaugural class.
Members of Time of Heroes soon found themselves on an upward career track. Mr. Zhoga became the presidential envoy to the Urals district, and in October was invited to join the Security Council.
Another participant in Time of Heroes, Yevgeny Pervyshov, a former mayor of the southern city of Krasnodar who signed up to fight in Ukraine in 2022, was named interim governor of the Tambov region. In December, one former member was given a role advising the leadership of Rosatom, the state nuclear corporation. Another became the deputy chairman of a St. Petersburg committee on law and order.
“As Vladimir Vladimirovich Putin said, we are forming a new elite of people who have shown that they can give everything for their homeland and for the state, including their lives,” said Oleg V. Panchurin, a career officer who leads the Association of Veterans of the Special Military Operation (the Kremlin’s euphemism for the war).
After being injured in the leg by a Ukrainian drone, Mr. Panchurin returned to Moscow and was among hundreds of veterans encouraged to run in the primaries of the ruling party, United Russia. The party allocated Ukraine veterans 25 extra percentage points on top of the votes they received, to give them a leg up.
Mr. Panchurin returned to the front and didn’t advance in the elections. But he has returned to Moscow, recently took the admission exam for the second class of Time of Heroes and aims to join Russia’s lower house of Parliament.
But independent observers say Time of Heroes is largely recycling people of means and not benefiting the lower rung of society, including many veterans, by giving them access to good administrative jobs.
“We still do not yet see any appointments to really high positions,” besides Mr. Zhoga, said Andrey Pertsev, a journalist with the exiled media outlet Meduza who covers the Russian presidential administration. “It is a P.R. tool.”
Mr. Pertsev noted that the region where Mr. Pervyshov was interim governor had a population and a budget smaller than the city where he was mayor. And a Time of Heroes alumnus appointed to Russia’s upper house of Parliament in September, Aleksey Kondratyev, had already served in the body on behalf of a different region from 2015 to 2020.
On top of that, Mr. Pertsev said, applicants for Time of Heroes are required with rare exceptions to already have a university degree.
Novaya Gazeta Europe, another independent outlet operating in exile, studied the biographies of 80 of the 83 participants in the first Time of Heroes cohort, and found that almost 80 percent were career military personnel, with only three mobilized soldiers. At least three of the participants have also been named by Ukrainian security services in war crimes accusations.
That hasn’t stopped the program from featuring heavily in the Kremlin’s messaging celebrating the war effort. Overseen by Mr. Putin’s powerful deputy chief of staff Sergei V. Kiriyenko, Time of Heroes has been heavily supported by Kremlin funding and is regularly featured in the media. Mr. Putin spoke about it repeatedly last month, including during a visit to a rehabilitation center, when he pledged to replicate Time of Heroes on a regional level.
Each appointment for a Time of Heroes graduate receives broad coverage in state and local media. Some of the men will play a role shaping Russia’s youngest generation, just as Mr. Rusinov hopes to.
Late last month, for instance, one Time of Heroes alumnus was appointed head of the Yunarmia, or Youth Army, a militarized throwback to the Young Pioneers of the Soviet era; it has more than one million participants, according to the state news agency TASS.
Mr. Rusinov hopes to follow suit. Since his return from the war he has lectured at schools and universities in the Samara region, and is training instructors in military-patriotic education.
In November, he sat the entrance exam for Time of Heroes and said he dreams of one day becoming the director of what he called a “military version of Hogwarts.”
