The issue of Azerbaijani citizens’ involvement in Russia’s war against Ukraine has once again come into focus in regional media in recent days. The trigger has been reports of Azerbaijani nationals killed at the front, as well as evidence of forced or semi-coercive recruitment of labor migrants into combat operations on Russia’s side. While these cases do not yet appear to be mass in scale, they nonetheless reveal a broader trend that extends well beyond a single state or a single national group.
According to open-source information, those involved are primarily Azerbaijani citizens who were residing in Russia as labor migrants, students, or temporary residents. In a number of cases, their involvement reportedly occurred under pressure, including threats of criminal prosecution, revocation of migration status, fabrication of criminal cases, or direct administrative coercion by security agencies. Some of these individuals subsequently found themselves in combat zones in Ukraine, where a number of them were killed. Relatives often learned of these deaths with significant delay and without clear or transparent official explanations.
A separate category includes individuals who formally signed contracts with Russian structures but did so under conditions of severely constrained choice. This fundamentally distinguishes the situation from classical mercenarism and raises the issue of systemic violations of migrants’ rights in wartime conditions. For Azerbaijan, this creates a dual challenge: on the one hand, the need to protect its citizens abroad; on the other, the imperative to clearly define legal red lines and to prevent any form of legitimization of participation in a foreign war.
It is in this context that the warning issued by the Prosecutor General’s Office of Azerbaijan should be understood. The agency emphasized that participation by Azerbaijani citizens in armed conflicts outside the country’s jurisdiction constitutes a serious criminal offense punishable by 8 to 20 years of imprisonment. The statement explicitly noted that repeated cases of Azerbaijani citizens’ involvement in the Russia–Ukraine war have been identified and that criminal proceedings have already been initiated in a number of instances.
At the same time, the Azerbaijani case represents only one fragment of a far larger process unfolding around Russia’s war against Ukraine. In terms of human losses, this conflict has become the deadliest war for Russia not only throughout the existence of the Russian Federation but effectively since the end of the Second World War. As of the end of 2025, Russia’s cumulative losses — including those killed, wounded, missing, and otherwise incapacitated — exceed 1.21 million personnel. These figures surpass the combined losses of the USSR and Russia in all conflicts since 1945 and, in relative terms, are comparable to or exceed the proportional losses of the Red Army during the Second World War.
Such a scale of losses has turned the continuous replenishment of manpower into a structural necessity. After the failure of the short-war scenario, Russia shifted to a model of protracted warfare in which mobilization — including coercive forms — became a central instrument. Regional data reveal a persistent imbalance: mobilization pressure is systematically shifted toward regions with a high share of Indigenous and non-Russian populations.
In 2022, approximately 2,000 people were mobilized in Novosibirsk Oblast, representing about 0.27 percent of the region’s male population. In the Republic of Sakha (Yakutia), more than 4,750 people were mobilized, amounting to 1.66 percent of the male population — more than six times higher. The heaviest burden fell on remote districts where small Indigenous communities live in compact settlements. A similar pattern is observed in the North Caucasus. Within six months of the war’s onset, authorities in North Ossetia officially acknowledged the deaths of around 100 residents, while Vladikavkaz experienced a shortage of burial space due to the continuous flow of war funerals. In Dagestan, the deaths of 1,769 individuals have been documented with personal identification, although researchers estimate that real figures may be significantly higher.
The Far East provides another illustrative example. In Khabarovsk Krai, where the pre-war population stood at approximately 1.29 million, mobilization among Indigenous peoples reached 95 per 10,000 residents, compared to 34 per 10,000 among the Russian population. Nationwide, around 67 percent of mobilized personnel come from rural areas and small towns, that is, from the most socially and politically vulnerable segments of society.
In absolute terms, the highest number of fatalities originates from Bashkortostan and Tatarstan. In relative terms, however, the most severe mortality rates are recorded in Tuva and Buryatia, at 171 and 139 deaths per 100,000 inhabitants respectively. For certain small Indigenous groups, these losses are existential. Among the 7,278 Todzha Tuvans, at least 151 deaths have been confirmed; among the 2,730 Telengits, at least 25. At such scales, even dozens of deaths constitute a direct threat to demographic sustainability and cultural survival.
The situation is further exacerbated by institutional suppression of independent analysis. In July 2024, Russia’s Ministry of Justice designated 55 organizations working on Indigenous issues as extremist, effectively blocking monitoring and data collection. Long-standing policies of Russification further complicate the identification of casualties and distort the true scale of losses.
In effect, Ukraine is becoming for Russia not merely a battlefield, but a space where the front functions as an instrument of systematic depletion of small and non-Russian peoples — both within Russia itself and beyond its formal jurisdiction. The combination of losses, asymmetric mobilization, and suppression of identity points to the long-term and structural nature of this process, the consequences of which already appear irreversible for a number of communities.
