To help them reintegrate, Putin signed a decree in 2023 establishing the Defenders of the Fatherland Foundation, a mostly government-funded entity meant to provide medical, legal, and psychological support to veterans of the war against Ukraine. The foundation's social media accounts paint it as a success, but the comments from users tell a different story. Soldiers and their families complain constantly of red tape, broken promises, and cold indifference. To understand how Defenders of the Fatherland actually operates, the independent Russian journalism project Veter spoke with veterans who sought its help and reviewed its financial filings.

‘Sending a doctor on an assault mission is absolute lunacy’

Oleg (name changed) is a Muscovite who trained and worked as a surgeon. In July 2022, he decided to enlist, thinking he could put his medical skills to use at the front. According to him, he wasn't in it for the money; he wanted to “help people."

“I was promised I'd serve in a hospital, and that the contract would last three months," he told Veter. “Instead, I ended up at the front, with a motorized rifle unit."

Oleg said that when he arrived at his posting, his commander took one look at him and said, “What am I supposed to do with you?” Before he knew it, the commander said, he would be a “200” — slang for a killed soldier.

Oleg was never transferred to a hospital. And instead of three months, he served a year and a half — until 28 February 2024, when he was discharged after being wounded. He sustained a spinal cord injury that affected his pelvic organ function. When he first returned from his service, he told Veter, he was like a “living mannequin,” but he’s gradually been recovering since. 

When he realized he wouldn't be able to practice surgery again, he decided to retrain as a reflexologist, a practitioner who uses acupuncture, massage, and heat therapy to treat conditions and aid recovery. To do that, he turned to the Defenders of the Fatherland Foundation, which is supposed to help veterans of the war in Ukraine with professional retraining.

“I told the foundation I wanted to rehabilitate other veterans," he explained. “Acupuncture helped me, making me better at walking and talking. But they weren't interested. They said I'd have to wait, and that if enough people with the same idea came along, they'd call me."

Time passed, and he received no word from the foundation. Oleg occasionally called them himself, but all they ever offered him was work as a security guard.

In the end, Oleg paid for the retraining himself. He now heads the medical unit at a private company and helps veterans as a neurologist and reflexologist through word of mouth. He has no plans to return to military service for now.

“Maybe I would want to keep serving, but not in a line position," he told Veter. “The enlistment office told me there were no medical positions available. And besides, if things had gone the way they should have… If I speak honestly right now, I could be prosecuted for 'discrediting the army'. But look — sending a doctor on an assault instead of letting him work in a hospital is absolute lunacy.”

‘I was very, very hurt’

The Defenders of the Fatherland Foundation was established by presidential decree on 3 April 2023. Its core mission is to support and assist Russian military personnel, including those who fought in the Donbas War that began in 2014. The foundation is meant to help veterans access social benefits, medications, medical care, and rehab equipment, as well as provide legal and psychological support, help with social reintegration, spa and sanatorium treatment, and job retraining and placement.

In his address to lawmakers announcing the program, Putin said the foundation’s work should be transparent, accessible, and free of “bureaucratic red tape”. To head the organisation, he tapped Anna Tsivileva — Putin's second cousin and the wife of Energy Minister Sergey Tsivilev. A year later, in 2024, the president appointed her deputy defence minister, and then state secretary of the ministry, effectively making her the ministry's top official on legislative affairs and issues related to the welfare of service members and veterans.

Defenders of the Fatherland branches have opened in every region of Russia and in Ukraine’s Russian-occupied territories. According to Tsivileva's most recent statements, the foundation employs 4,300 coordinators.

In early January 2026, a shocking incident occurred at the organisation’s branch in the Oryol region: a 45-year-old man named Malik Shikhsafiev attempted to take his own life inside the foundation's offices, slashing his neck with a razor blade before threatening to douse himself in gasoline and set himself on fire.

Three and a half years earlier, in mid-2022, Shikhsafiev had joined the war straight from prison. He was serving time for murdering his girlfriend, whom he had struck 30 times in the head. According to him, representatives of the Wagner mercenary group  showed up at his penal colony and said that “Russia needs help, it needs people". He and other inmates were loaded onto a plane and flown to Ukraine, where they signed their contracts.

In December 2023, Shikhsafiev was shot in the left shoulder and sent to a military hospital. After returning to his village in the Oryol region, he went to Defenders of the Fatherland to obtain a certificate confirming his status as a veteran of the war in Ukraine, which would entitle him to financial and medical benefits. Since Wagner’s disbandment in 2023, former mercenaries can apply for the document through the Defence Ministry, which the foundation is meant to facilitate.

According to Shikhsafiev, the foundation accepted the documents confirming his Wagner service and forwarded them to the Defence Ministry. However, he still hasn't received his certificate. On top of that, the military medical commission he went through refused to certify that his injuries were sustained as a direct result of combat, which means he cannot claim the higher disability pension available to wounded veterans. In reviewing complaints posted by former soldiers on social media, Veter found this to be one of the most common grievances: proving to the commission that an injury was caused by the war, rather than simply occurring during it, is notoriously difficult.

“I'm physically unable to work," said the former soldier and murder convict. “The foundation sent me to Volgograd to get an [medical] exoskeleton. But what use is that without surgery? I need a major operation. My elbow joint needs to be replaced. And at the foundation, they photographed me with the exoskeleton and told me to wait for a time slot for surgery.”

Shikhsafiev is now registered at the unemployment office. In May, he plans to enroll in a security guard training course and then look for work on his own. The foundation, he said, has been no help with that either.

According to Tsivileva's public statements, in the two years since the foundation was established, more than 10,000 veterans have sought help finding employment, including around 2,000 with disabilities. As of early 2025, 35% of them remained unemployed, down from 46% in 2024.

Shikhsafiev arranged a personal meeting with the head of the Oryol branch, Olga Anisimova. When he arrived at the office, she wasn't there. That's when he took out the razor blade and cut himself.

“I was very, very hurt," Shikhsafiev said. “How do I put it? The way they treated me just left this awful feeling."

‘They must be saving the budget’

The Defenders of the Fatherland Foundation is almost entirely state-funded. In its first months of operation, the Russian government allocated 1.314 billion rubles (€14.7 million) to the foundation — nearly all of which went toward staff salaries and office costs.

“It makes sense that the foundation is spending large sums on itself, because it has branches in every region," explained a civil society expert in Russia who asked to remain anonymous. “Office rent alone is a massive expense, to say nothing of staff salaries, which aren't disclosed. So especially in the early stages, high administrative costs can be justified."

At the same time, the expert continued, Defenders of the Fatherland isn't a conventional charitable foundation, but a state one. In practice, it was created to perform a function the state is itself obligated to fulfill: supporting military personnel and their families.

“For ordinary charitable foundations, publishing reports is standard practice — it's one of the criteria for grant applications to the Presidential Grants Fund, for example. We've spent years fighting for financial transparency," the expert said. “But state foundations aren't subject to those same formal requirements. Theoretically, they could spend every ruble on their own apparatus and do nothing else."

In other words, assessing the foundation's effectiveness is virtually impossible.

Dmitry (name changed) also fought in Ukraine as part of Wagner Group. He was seriously wounded during the battle for Bakhmut, after which his contract was terminated.

After returning home to the Krasnodar region, he went to Defenders of the Fatherland to obtain his veteran ID.

“Most of the fighters and their families have no idea about Russian law, or the local laws in their region, which are full of hidden pitfalls," Dmitry said. “So people just give up when it comes to dealing with any kind of bureaucratic problem."

The foundation assigned Dmitry a coordinator, who was supposed to help him gather paperwork and advise him on any issues that came up.

“I could see she wasn’t exactly rushing," he said. “Even though I have all the documents. She would send me these short, unhelpful replies. She's never in the office. Meanwhile the foundation is constantly posting these notorious — sometimes frankly nauseating — photo ops on social media, where it's really the staff who are being showcased, and the soldiers are standing in the back like they've just been tossed a bone."

Getting no answers, Dmitry went over his coordinator's head to the director of the Krasnodar branch, Alexander Starovoitov — himself a veteran of the war in Ukraine.

“He talked down to me," Dmitry recalled. “I asked him, ‘Why is this so unfair? The coordinators do nothing, and all the payments only go to people who signed contracts with the Defence Ministry.’ And he just flat-out told me: we could raise this at the governor's level, but we don't want to, because you're mercenaries, you went for the money. I said, ‘What do you think — did the guys who signed with the Defence Ministry go for free? They all went out of patriotism?’ And he said, well, yes, of course."

According to Dmitry, nearly two years after he returned from the front, Starovoitov's deputy finally helped him get his veteran's ID. He never got anywhere with his personal coordinator.

"But for some reason the coordinators don't get fired," Dmitry said. "They must be useful to someone. They must be saving the budget. Meanwhile on social media they keep saying: we did this, we did that. We veterans just sit there while a shower of bullshit pours into our ears.”

This year the foundation also announced it was helping veterans apply for a “social contract” — a federal program that gives low-income citizens a one-time payment of 350,000 rubles (€4,600) to start a business. The program isn't exclusive to veterans: any Russian resident can apply, provided they put together a decent business plan.

"That program is for absolutely fucking everyone," Dmitry fumes. "Even that kind of state support they've claimed as their own achievement. And they write about Tsivileva everywhere — she went here, she went there." The foundation's social media does indeed publish a steady stream of updates about Tsivileva's travel schedule; in just the past two months she has visited Bashkortostan, the Moscow region, the Irkutsk region, and the Kemerovo region. "Who's paying for her to constantly fly around like that? All they're doing is making people hate them."

Scroll through the comments under virtually any post on the foundation's social media pages, and what you find, above all, are complaints — from veterans or their family members.

“Some organisations are decent,” one commenter said. “And then there are ones like this: pathetic, run like it's staffed by teenagers who've never heard of basic communication."

"Just disappointed,” another said. “They have no real lawyers, it's all just self-promotion!"

These kinds of comments number in the hundreds.

Dmitry is now 37. His wound left him with no lasting disability, but he has no plans to return to the front. In his view, "the army is a complete mess." That's precisely why he signed with Wagner rather than the Ministry of Defence: the private military company, he said, has "order and competent, sober leadership", its fighters are "properly taken care of", and contracts end on time.

"The army is nothing like that," he said. "And those recruitment pitches — come sign with us, you'll get a signing bonus, the contract's only a year — it's all lies. People sign up mainly because of financial problems, but of course no one's going to discharge you after a year. You're there for life."

A convenient cover

The resources of the Defenders of the Fatherland Foundation grow every year. In 2023–2024, the foundation received a combined total of over 28 billion rubles (€315.8 million) from the state budget. For 2025, the planned allocation was upward of 25 billion (€282 million) — but as the outlet Mozhem Obyasnit discovered, the foundation ultimately received considerably more: 42.66 billion rubles (€480.1 million).

According to its financial reports, 28 billion (€315.5 million) of that went toward payments to veterans who sustained injuries resulting in disability. The foundation spent 7.65 billion rubles (€86.1 million) on administrative overhead, including staff salaries. In 2023 and 2024, the organisation spent a quarter of its budget — over 3 billion rubles (€33.8 million) — on salaries and operational costs.

Grigory Sverdlin, founder of the deserter-assistance project Get Lost, believes the foundation’s operations amount to a cover for embezzling public money.

"An annual budget of 42 billion rubles (€472.8 million) is several times larger than that of any charitable foundation in Russia — including ones like the Vladimir Potanin Foundation (around 6 billion rubles, or €65.7 million, for 2025) or foundations set up by oil companies. Independent NGOs don't come anywhere close to that kind of money," Sverdlin noted.

The civil society expert who spoke to Veter pointed out that the foundation is a convenient vehicle for pressuring major businessmen into financing support for veterans of the war in Ukraine.

"The foundation has two revenue streams: the budget and donations. For the second, you can lean on our businessmen — tell them, 'Come on, guys, put some money in.' It's essentially a ready-made mechanism for shaking down entrepreneurs to serve state ends," the expert said. For now, though, that mechanism remains largely unused: donations — 450 million rubles (€5.1 million) — account for just over 1% of the foundation’s total 2025 budget.

Looking ahead to 2026, Anna Tsivileva has already announced the opening of additional fund branches, now extending down to the municipal level. The draft federal budget for 2026–2028 includes a record allocation for the foundation: 50 billion rubles (€561.3 million).

According to Grigory Sverdlin, his colleagues in Russia who continue working with the homeless are regularly approached by men in camouflage who say they fought in the war and now feel abandoned.

"It's strange that people expected anything different," Sverdlin said. "By now it should be obvious to everyone: the Motherland will always discard you in the end. If at one end of the country people are being sent into meatgrinder assaults and the only metric anyone cares about is how much territory has been seized, it's naive to think that on the other side of the front line, someone is busy worrying about getting veterans the most comfortable prosthetics possible."

Yulia Myagkova