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By Shane Croucher
Senior Editor
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Russian President Vladimir Putin said the next generation of the country's political leadership must be veterans of the Ukraine war.
Putin made the comments during a meeting with different factions of the Russian State Duma and spoke of the participation of Ukraine war veterans in elections.
There is little room for significant dissent or political opposition in Putin's Russia, and the United Russia party to which he is closely aligned is in firm control.
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His new demand signals a further entrenching of the hard-line Russian nationalism that dominates political power under Putin, and fuels Moscow's renewed Cold War with the West, a culture that will likely endure beyond his eventual departure.
"We must search for, find, and put forward people who are fearless in serving the Motherland and who have been willing to risk their health and even their lives," Putin said, originally in Russian, state news agency TASS reported.
"Such people should be promoted to leadership positions. They will be our successors. This is something we need to think about. And thank you for putting forward such people."
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Russia Troop Losses in Ukraine
Russia launched its full-scale invasion of Ukraine in February 2022 and has drafted hundreds of thousands of people to fight, even releasing prisoners from their sentences early to serve on the grueling front lines.
It does not regularly publish figures on troop losses, but independent Russian media publication Mediazona and the BBC estimate it to be at least 130,150 so far, based on their research.
Those who survive sometimes return home deeply traumatized, creating a new wave of social problems for the Russian state to tackle, including violent crime, as it attempts to reintegrate veterans.
"All told, perhaps over 1.5 million Russian men and women had participated in the war as of the start of 2025," Mark Galeotti, a British expert on Russia who wrote a report on the issue for the Global Initiative against Transnational Organized Crime, told Reuters.
"As more and more of them begin to be demobilized and return home, Russia will see an influx of veterans... bearing the psychological impacts of war."
Ukraine War Peace Deal Elusive
The war continues to grind on despite a push by President Donald Trump to broker a peace deal. Russia has seized around a fifth of Ukrainian territory so far. It has refused Ukraine's offer of a ceasefire, saying it would prefer to go straight to a deal.
But there remain two major points of difference, namely on territorial concessions and the future architecture of Ukrainian security, which are not easily reconciled.
Russia says it launched its invasion to deter Ukrainian ambitions to join NATO—which it regards as a major security threat—and to protect ethnic Russians from what it said was persecution in Ukraine.
But Ukraine accuses Russia of an imperial war of conquest, as well as seeking to erase Ukrainian sovereignty and identity by folding the country under Moscow's control.
Updated, 9/18/25, 11:25 a.m. ET: This article was updated with more information.
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