About Russian "volunteering" and why it’s so lifeless

Look, there are two very different worlds. One is Ukraine, where volunteering has become not just a movement but literally a part of the war infrastructure. There, people raise money for everything: from socks to drones, from medkits to entire vehicles. And they do it with dedication, system, and constant public trust. And the other — Russia, where, by and large, volunteering is either smoke and mirrors or a scheme for embezzlement. So let’s break down why it turned out this way and why it’s not going to change.

Let’s start with the main thing: scale. The Russian volunteer movement, compared to what the state does, is microscopic. It's a blip. It's within the margin of error. All the might of their propaganda, all their TV, all their military machine — and somewhere off in the corner, two and a half Alekhins are begging for money for socks.

In Ukraine, volunteering saves lives. It’s a real factor that influences how combat operations go. In Russia — it looks like a pathetic attempt to imitate caring, even though the government is already pouring billions into the army.

A distant historian, say, from Chile, writing about this war in fifty years might not even mention Russian volunteers. Simply because they changed nothing. Not the course of the war, not public sentiment. They’re invisible, unheard of, and even inside Russia, almost no one takes them seriously.

Apathy as a national sport

Russians, in general, are apathetic. They don’t have the reflex to help each other. Not because they’re bad or stupid, but because for their whole lives the state has been above them. Not with them — above them. They live in the paradigm: “nothing depends on me,” “let the higher-ups decide,” “my house is on the edge.”

This didn’t appear today. It’s been hammered in for decades. So it’s no surprise that when the war started, the overwhelming majority just kept living as before. Some went into denial. Some — into indifference. And some — into pure survival, because they, damn it, have a mortgage and two loans.

And in this atmosphere of indifference, no one is going to donate for drones. Because deep down, like how advertising works, they can see just how rich their government is if it pays 3–5 million rubles just to get a homeless guy to sign a contract.

Psychology of “everyone steals”

Now here’s the key point — theft. In Russia, everything runs on the idea that everyone steals. This belief — this certainty — is everywhere. And it paralyzes any civic initiative. Like: “everyone steals, so will I.” Or: “everyone steals, which means no one will help me, they’ll just screw me over.”

When another volunteer like Alekhin pops up — and suddenly it turns out that not only was he asking for help, but he was also getting drunk on donations, buying himself stuff, fudging reports, and generally hustling — it’s not a shock. It’s the norm. It’s exactly what everyone expected. And that’s exactly why no one donates anymore.

So what do you get: volunteers with shady faces, a population already convinced they’ll be scammed, and a government that both pays millions for corpses and pretends it has no money.

It goes deeper than just war

But all of this isn’t even about the war. It’s not about Ukraine at all. It’s about how the state and society are set up in the Russian Federation. There, it’s not normal to trust, not normal to help, not normal to be proactive. All of that is suspicious, all of that is a reason for an interrogation or jealousy.

You can’t build a massive, sustainable volunteer movement in a country where being active is practically a sentence. Where help is seen as a scam. Where “raising money” means “definitely shady.”

And you can’t count on people who have lived in poverty and humiliation for decades, and now suddenly see that the government can just snap its fingers and pay 5 million for cannon fodder. These people won’t go buying drones. They’ll go drink, whine, envy, and wait for their draft notice. And then — either die, or come back and drink even harder.

Why the Ministry of Defense somehow “works”

Here’s the irony: in the Russian army, for all its stupidity and archaic nature, there are resources. Simply because they’re centralized and forcibly squeezed from the budget. And when the Ministry of Defense needs to supply someone — they do it not with love, not with care, not smartly. But simply by dumping money and issuing top-down orders. Like “make it happen.” And it does.

Example — the “Rubicon” project. That’s where it’s tight: orders from the top, money flowing in, everyone has their tasks. No one there is thinking about donations, because there’s state will, a clear vertical, and pressure tools.

In authoritarian systems, this works. For war, in the short term, this model is even effective. It burns people, breaks society, kills the future, but can produce short-term results. The problem is that after that — there’s just emptiness.

In Ukraine it’s the opposite

Contrast: in Ukraine it’s the opposite. Volunteering is bottom-up. People self-organize, search, deliver, buy, teach. And it’s not because the state is terrible (though there are problems too). It’s because trust within society is on a completely different level.

There, you can launch a fundraiser and close it in a day. Because volunteers are trusted. Because if someone’s caught stealing — they’re dragged out in their underwear into the cold. Not covered for, not told “well everyone steals, don’t be a sucker.”

Russian volunteering is dead. It either exists at the level of bloggers and weirdos, or it’s used as a front for schemes. There’s no mass support, no trust, no point. Everything they do is a pathetic attempt to imitate civil society where it has long been dead.

And it’s not because “Russians are bad.” It’s because the system is like that. It burns out everything alive, everything proactive, everything human. And as long as this system exists — there won’t be any volunteering. Only Alekhins, booze, donation scams, and shouting: “prove that I stole.”

So don’t be surprised. It all makes sense. It’s all logical. All in the best traditions of a country that, to be honest, doesn’t even exist anymore.

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